In a previous post we recommended some great apps for supporting your child’s learning at home during the Covid-19 outbreak. Today we’re going to take a deeper look at one of our favourite, Khan Academy Kids.
Khan Academy Family
It’s better known big brother, Khan Academy, has been supporting children and adults to learn math, sciences, programming and more for a while now. It’s based on a model of high quality direct instruction (usually videos) followed by independent practice questions to check for understanding and monitor progress.
A more recent addition to the family in Khan Academy Kids, a learning platform for children aged 2-7. Like Khan Academy its free to access and responds to the learner. The app targets key learning areas such as early literacy skills, number sense, writing, etc all of which are introduced through characters and stories.
Why choose Khan Academy Kids
There’s a few reasons we like this app so much;
- It’s designed by educational specialists; this gives families confidence that the activities are developmentally appropriate and will be beneficial to your child.
- It’s balanced; the mixture of literacy (including some lovely stories), numeracy and social-emotional learning appeals to me over apps that target a narrow area
- It’s add free and doesn’t link out to other content; I’m very mindful of what my children see/can click and although they’re never unsupervised on tablets this is reassuring as I know nothing unexpected will pop up
Using Khan Academy Kids during School Closures
When trying to balance screen time and filling time we’re trying out best to make good choices for supporting our children to learn. Here’s how we’re using it;
- Limited time: we keep to 20 minutes per session for our 5 year old
- Supervision: we always make sure he’s sat next to one of us and talking to us about what he’s doing
- Balance: after screen time we do something physical and screen free
- Guided Access/Kids Mode: we make sure to use our device’s parental controls too just to be sure
By having him sit next to us but using something as kid-friendly as this we can be working on our work, responding to emails, reading to our daughter, etc. yet without leaving him alone.
