Episode 1.20 Make Your Own Kid Podcast 1

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This summer, we want to show tweens how easy it is to make your own podcast for kids! The Middle School Mind is launching a three episode series to guide you step by step to create your own tween podcast.

If you enjoy listening to The Middle School Mind podcast for kids and you’ve wondered how easy it is to make your own kid’s podcast by kids for kids, we are here to help.

Making your own podcast is easy, fun and does not cost a lot to start. We are here to show you step by step how we make The Middle School Mind podcast in hopes that you will start your very own podcast. And, summer is the perfect time to start!

To get started, you will need the help of a parent or responsible adult to help you create your podcast on the podcast app, Anchor and download graphics and create your own podcast title card, you will need to access free sites like Canva and Pexels.

To make this process even easier, we recommend you download the attached PDF guide that shows you handy screen shots to walk through the process every step of the way!

Download the following step-by-step guide to help you out!

Make Your Own Kid Podcast Guide Download

Podcasting is awesome!

In this episode, Son talks about why he wanted to start a podcast. He originally wanted his own YouTube channel or a Twitch channel to stream video games. Those sites use video and as his parent, I did not feel comfortable with him showing his face and people possibly finding out who he is. Plus, some people on those forums can be rude and unkind.

Podcast Microphone with Audio Editing Screen in Background for Middle School Podcast

The podcast allows him to remain anonymous and gives him a chance to talk about his interests and share his thoughts! Plus, as his dad, I can be there with him to have a conversation and make sure he is being kind and respectful.

What kind of podcast do you want to make?

This is the great part. You get to decide what you want to talk about. If you’re really into baseball facts and figures, you can talk about that. You can launch your own podcast on gaming if you want to publish video game reviews to help other gamers level up their game play. For the artistic types, you can create a show to talk about all the techniques and artists you like.

You decide what kind of podcast you want to make. If you decide that you want to cover a broad range of topics, that’s great too. That’s what Son decided when we created The Middle School Mind!

Equipment checklist

We are not professional podcasters. Son is a full-time student and I have a full-time office job. So if you are picturing thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment and a fancy studio, that is not us. You don’t need a ton of equipment to get started either.

For our little independent tween podcast, we use the following equipment to make our podcast:

A Chromebook

I have a Chromebook that I use for work and we also use it to make The Middle School Mind. Chromebooks are very reasonably priced and can be purchased for a few hundred dollars. Some refurbished Chromebooks are in like-new condition and some can even be purchased for under $100. Here are a few Chromebook options for you to check out:

If you have a phone or tablet, you can use the Anchor app to record, edit and publish your podcast. Personally, I find editing, uploading pictures and typing in show notes so much easier using the larger screen and full size keyboard on my Chromebook.

A USB microphone

Since I have a full-time office job, I am frequently on conference calls and Zoom meetings. When we all worked from home during the pandemic, I bought a USB microphone for work. I never thought I’d use it to make a podcast, but we use the Logitech Blue Snowball microphone.

If you listen to the show, you can make up your own mind if you think it sounds good or not. We like it, we already have it, and last time I checked, it was around $40 on amazon.com.

The one thing I will say is when Son and I are recording, Son is typically right in front of the mic and I am usually off to the side. So Son usually sounds crystal clear, while I may sound like I’m in the background. Overall, we like our Blue Snowball mic so much so that we want to give away a Blue Snowball to one of our lucky listeners this summer!

Other podcasting microphones to consider include:

Computer speakers

If you listen to the show, you know that we play some games and trivia on many of our episodes. We use the speakers to play the ding for right answers or buzzers for wrong answers. We get those sound effects for free on a website called MyInstants. And we turn up the speakers and that’s what you hear when we are playing our games.

Just a note on MyInstants, there can be some not-so-family-friendly content on there, so please get your parents permission before you use that website.

Like I said, we are not a professional podcast, so we use as much free stuff as possible!

Anyway, here’s a few speaker options that you may want to consider:

Headphones (optional)

This is not so important for recording, but I use it a lot during editing. Editing is cutting out our mistakes, or when we get the giggles or we have a lot ummms, ahhhs or even long stretches of silence. You want your podcast to sound pretty clean and polished!

Here’s a few headphones that are reasonably priced and would be great for editing:

So when I edit the episodes, my family doesn’t really enjoy listening to the same thing over and over again. The headphones allow me to listen for the things I want to edit out without bothering my family around me.

Again, this is what we use and a lot of it we had already because of school and work, so we did not have a ton of upfront costs to make this podcast.

If you have a phone or tablet and want to get started with that, go for it! You don’t have to have a professional studio or equipment to get your amazing ideas out in podcast land!

Name your podcast

Here’s where your creative juices start flowing! What do you want your podcast to be called?

If we think back to our baseball facts and figures example from earlier, you could name your podcast “Kids Talk Baseball” or “Major League Kids”
For our video game fan, their podcast could be “Kids Level Up”
And our artist could call their podcast “Tween Art Techniques”

So, what will you call your new podcast?

Plan your first episode

So this is Summer School after all so there is some work to be done by you. But hopefully this is fun work and easy for you to start.

Before we record, I ask Son to jot down a few bullet points and we frame it as questions that we want to ask and answer on each episode. For example, in our very first episode Hello World we had a few questions we wanted to ask and answer:

Who are we? This is where we introduce ourselves.
What can our listeners expect from The Middle School Mind? This is where we talked about the kinds of topics Son wanted to talk about like video games, movies, TV, etc and we also talked about how often we would post episodes.
What’s something that’s on Son’s mind this episode? This is where Son talked about Cuphead which is a video game that he found very frustrating.

So that’s it. He prepared three questions to give us structure to the episode. We didn’t script out our thoughts ahead of time. I played the role of asking the questions, making sure he stayed on track and didn’t go off on too many random tangents and I also watched the timer to make sure we didn’t go over time.

Anchor has a 30-minute maximum time for each recording session and originally we wanted to keep episodes as close to 20 minutes as possible for a few reasons:

For our first few episodes, we wanted to keep it short. We had no idea if Son was going to even do an episode two, so the first episode was easy to get 20 minutes of recording out there.
We wanted to keep it short for our listeners. Listeners are going to find out pretty quickly if they like you or not, so give them some entertainment in 20-30 minutes. It didn’t make a lot of sense for us to try to make a 45 minute or an hour long episode.
Selfishly, editing 20-30 minutes of audio takes a lot less time than an hour long episode. The thing about editing is that you have to listen and go back multiple times. So when you hear a 25 minute episode, I have spent at least an hour and a half editing out all the umms, ahhs and giggles and then listening to the entire episode so it makes sense.

Enter to win your own Blue Snowball microphone!

Thank you for listening to the show. We really appreciate our listeners and we hope this summer school series will inspire you to Make Your Own Kid Podcast this summer break.

We want to help our listeners with making your own podcast and we will be giving away a total of (2) Logitech Blue Snowball microphones this summer to two of our lucky listeners. The Blue Snowball microphone is the same one we use to record The Middle School Mind and hope you will use it to make your own podcast!

If you want to be part of the drawing, here’s how to enter:

Please leave us a 4 or 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or the podcast platform that you listen to.
Please go to our website at themiddleschoolmind.com/about us and at the bottom of the page you can Contact Us.
Send us your name, contact information and let us know where we can find your review. Once you send us this information, you will be entered into our drawing.
We will be pulling out two names at random and will be following up with those winners directly by August 1, 2022.

It’s that easy!

Links to our Make Your Own Kid Podcast series

We are now a proud member of the Kids Listen community!

Kids Listen’s mission is to build community, advocate for the growth of the medium, and create standards and ethics that serve as best practices for development, production, and monetization. Image courtesy of Kids Listen.

The Middle School Mind is now a proud member of Kids Listen. Kids Listen is a grassroots organization of advocates for high-quality audio content for children.

Kids Listen is creating platforms for producers to share ideas, and publish data and information relevant to creators, consumers, and supporters of podcasts for kids.

Thank you to our listeners!

You can reach The Middle School Mind on our About Us page, Facebook page or Twitter (@TMSM_Podcast). Thanks for listening!

Thank you for listening to the show. We really appreciate our listeners and we hope you have a wonderful summer.

For more episodes of The Middle School Mind podcast, check out our latest podcasts below

Bonus Episode: 1.1 Hello World! Relisten – The Middle School Mind

In this bonus episode of The ⁠Middle School Mind⁠ podcast, Father and Son take a listen back to our very first episode, Hello World when he was early in his 6th grade year as a fresh-faced middles schooler. It's a fun way to poke fun and reminisce about our time making the podcast. This is the final, final episode of The Middle School Mind podcast and thank you to all who were part of this amazing ride. For all you middle school kids out there listening to us. You can make your own podcast easily. You guys have amazing ideas and get your voices out there! — Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themiddleschoolmind/support