For Teachers
Real kid creations from across Australia. Ad-free.
All areas of learning.
There's so many reasons teachers love theINmag. Here's three we keep hearing...
ENGAGEMENT
Kids read it because they want to.
Real Aussie kids fill every page - their stories, their art, their jokes, their puzzles. Your students see themselves in it instantly. The engagement is built in - because the content actually belongs to them. Open-ended prompts, real-world problems, the kind of rich tasks kids can take in their own direction.
MENTOR TEXTS
Genuine authenticity.
Every piece is a mentor text written by a kid their age, in their voice, with their wonky bits and brilliant turns. Far more persuasive than anything in a textbook. Show your students what's possible, then watch them reach for it - across literacy, art, numeracy and wellbeing.
REAL AUDIENCE
Writing for kids they've never met.
A classroom task with a real audience changes everything. Submit your students' creations - the ones we publish reach Aussie kids right across the country. Suddenly the ending matters. Suddenly the word choice matters. Suddenly they care.
DIGITAL FOR SCHOOLS
Most digital products lock you in. Ours don't. Buy one PDF and share it with whoever benefits - your class, your colleagues, your whole school community.
There's one in every classroom. The quiet one. The reluctant writer. The kid who's brilliant but won't read aloud. theINmag gives them a way through - their words, their art, their voice, on a page that goes out to thousands of Aussie kids. Something shifts after that. You'll see it.
Free to submit. Open to every Aussie kid. Curated by teachers.
We comb through every Australian kids' competition worth entering - art, writing, photography, science - and curate the best ones into a single hub.
and how it links to your curriculum
A full Australian map, dotted with the location of every kid who's been published in the issue. Built-in geography lesson: how far apart are these creators? What landmarks sit between them? Whose dot is closest to your school? Brilliant for distance, scale, mapping conventions and place-based discussion. Bonus when one of the dots ends up belonging to your classroom.
Each issue, one outstanding piece of kid writing is chosen as the Feature Story - typically a picture story book, complete with kid-created illustrations. A natural shared-reading text. A genuine mentor text. Written by a kid your students' age, which makes it land in a way published authors never quite can.
Writing organised by purpose: Persuade, Inform, Entertain. Every piece is a kid sample your students can study, critique and emulate. Ideal for modelled writing, text-type analysis, paragraph structure and voice. Use the PIE framework as a launching pad for your own classroom writing unit, then submit your students' best pieces to be considered for the next issue.
Real reflections from real kids on emotions, friendships and safety. It's pretty amazing to see kids sharing the strategies they use to maintain a healthy way of being. Use as a circle-time prompt, a journal starter, or a discussion springboard for your wellbeing block.
A gallery of kid-made artworks across every medium - drawing, painting, sculpture, craft, chalk, pottery, mixed media. Use any piece as a picture prompt for 'I notice, I wonder' protocols, story starters, art critique sessions, or visual literacy work. Show your students what's possible from kids their age and watch the bar rise across the whole room.
Kid-created jokes, riddles, puzzles, codes and cool facts. Brilliant warm-up content, mental break activities, or a launching pad for your own classroom problem-solving sessions. Get your students designing their own riddles to send IN - the cognitive load is significant, and the engagement is immediate.
Real maths problems posed by Aussie kids. The problems are surprisingly deep and thought-provoking - perfect for 'I notice, I wonder' protocols, open-ended numeracy tasks, or as a launching pad for rich classroom problem-solving sessions. A masterclass in showing students that there's more than one way to solve a problem.
Photography submitted by Aussie kids - landscapes, animals, plants, buildings, found-object compositions (no faces, for safety). Brilliant prompts for descriptive writing, narrative starters, visual analysis. A perfect excuse to send your students outside with a camera or device of their own, then send their best shots IN for the next issue.
Each issue features a working professional who loves what they do. Great for career-focused units, 'what do you want to be' conversations, or as an example of long-form interview writing. Pairs well with a class project where your students interview someone in their own community.
Aussie kids sharing what they love to do outside of school - and the cross-curricular links are everywhere. Cooking, music, nature, building, gaming, sport, pets, art. Use these pages to draw out your own students' passions and tie them into your curriculum. Tap into what your students already love, and watch engagement go through the roof.
Creativity
Why Your Kid Stops Creating Around Age 8.There's a piece of NASA research I think about a lot. In the late 1960s, George Land was hired to design a creativity test...
Homeschooling
Homeschooling vs Unschooling - What's the Difference?Most parents who type this into Google are weighing it up. Not picking a side, not committing to a philosophy. They're trying to understand...
Open Tasks
Stop Searching for Fake Samples. Use Real Ones.I spent two years pulling this apart as a line of inquiry. I was nose-deep in my learning specialist course, and one of my...
Wellbeing
How We Keep Kids Safe at theINmag.theINmag is a pretty special place. Kids get to see their creations in print, with their name on the page, in a magazine made...
Nothing here yet for that view. Try another filter.
WHO MAKES THIS
We're Ryan and Tam - partners, parents, and classroom teachers. We saw how much harder kids worked when creativity was the way in, not the reward at the end. theINmag is the thing we wished existed for them. Three issues a year of pure kid creativity, designed to inspire and give real kids a voice.
A retired principal's pick for the grandkids
“Many thanks! Congratulations on a great effort. I'm a retired principal from primary schools and I am now looking for things for my grandchildren of an educational nature.”
Paying by school invoice? Just hit the School invoice button at checkout - we'll send it the same day.
RECOMMENDED
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LOWER COMMITMENT
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The stuff teachers actually ask us.
Honest answer up front - no, and that's deliberate. Early on we considered mapping every section of theINmag to specific curriculum dot-points, but several school principals told us not to. Their reasoning stuck: prescriptive curriculum mapping takes the creativity out of your planning. It also locks the magazine into a single year level when it's actually built to be multi-age and multi-ability.
A piece in the Art Hub might inspire a Foundation kid to draw and a Year 6 kid to analyse composition. theINmag is the stimulus. You're the teacher. The lesson is yours to design.
The magazine is created by and for Australian kids aged roughly 5 to 13, and it's deliberately open. Whether you're a Foundation teacher or running a Year 7 English block, there are elements in every issue you can pull into your planning - or use for informal classroom practice.
Younger students engage with the art, photography, jokes and visual prompts. Older students dive into the writing, problem-solving and career features. The same issue, used across multiple year levels, lands differently every time.
The most common uses we see:
theINmag sits beautifully alongside your existing planning. It's not a curriculum replacement, it's a high-quality stimulus your students will genuinely engage with.
Yes - that's the whole point. Buy one digital issue and you're free to share it across your classroom, your year level, your staff, or your whole school. Project it on the board. Email it to colleagues. Send it home with families. Build a school library of every issue.
We do this because we want every kid in Australia to have access to theINmag - to know there's a special place for them to be seen, inspired and published. Locking the digital behind a per-user licence runs counter to everything we're trying to do. So we don't.
Yes. Schools can order theINmag and pay by invoice on Net 14 terms - no card needed at checkout. Email us through the contact page or hit the School invoice button at checkout and we'll send the invoice the same day.
Bulk discounts apply automatically: 5+ Memberships = 5% off, 10+ Memberships = 10% off. The Build a Bundle section is the easiest way to set up a class set - the discounts apply as you build. If you've got a more complex order, get in touch and we'll sort it manually.
Yes - we run school visits across Australia, but it depends entirely on where we are at any given time (we're currently travelling around the country in a campervan with a small human).
What a workshop looks like is flexible. We've run full art workshops with classes. We've launched persuasive writing and poetry units alongside teachers. Some schools have us zip between classrooms doing half-hour introductions to the magazine. Others have wanted us in front of an assembly to hit every kid at once. We much prefer working with individual classes - the engagement runs deeper - but we're totally open to whatever works for your school.
We're putting together a dedicated workshops page soon. In the meantime, email heyhey@theinmag.com.au and we'll let you know if we're heading your way.
Easy - head to the Send IN page and follow the prompts. Every published creation needs parent or guardian consent, so the form includes a permission step.
Two workflows that work for busy teachers:
The annual consent: Download our consent form, hand it out at the start of the year, collect them back, and you're good to submit student creations all year. No chasing consent every time inspiration strikes.
The QR code on the wall: Every issue of theINmag has a cut-out page at the back with a massive QR code on it. Pin it up. If there's a spare iPad floating around the school, students can scan the code, take a photo of their creation and submit themselves - even kids from Grade 1 are doing this independently. Bonus: it's a great little IT skill for them to practise.
A mentor text is a high-quality piece of writing used as a model to teach craft - structure, voice, vocabulary, technique. The best mentor texts feel achievable to the students reading them.
That's why kid-written mentor texts often outperform adult ones in the classroom: when a student reads a powerful piece written by another kid their age, they think 'I could do that too' - and that belief is half the battle. Every Featured Story and Taste the PIE piece in theINmag is a ready-made mentor text.
