Sandy Suggests... Khan Academy Kids and Reading Trackers
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In this edition of Sandy Suggests...
Sandy Suggests: Khan Academy Kids app
Category: Study Methods, Tools and Hacks
Why Sandy Suggests It:
I’m just going to get straight to the point: If you want your child to learn English, or improve their English whether they are a native speaker or not, be it for “early literacy, reading, writing, language,” or math, all the while encouraging “creativity and building social-emotional skills”, you must download the Khan Academy Kids app. Yep, this post is just a ringing endorsement of this product. If you are the kind of parent or guardian of kids aged 2-8 (because kids under 2 shouldn’t be having screen time), who allows screen time but doesn’t want their kid playing mindless games, expensive games, or, heck, just annoying sounding games with bad animation, then you have to check out this app.
It’s hard to believe it even exists, quite frankly. It harkens back to the golden days of public broadcasting when it seemed like so many kids’ shows were not only free (or very inexpensive, at least) but of super high quality. And that’s the thing - this app is 100 percent free, meaning it’s subscription free and, thankfully, ad free which is just about impossible to find. That’s probably because it was “...developed in collaboration with learning experts at Stanford and aligned with the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework and Common Core Standards” (source: from the Khan Academy Kids website) and studies show Khan Academy Kids boosts pre-literacy skills. This is because it will “read to” your kids from an extensive library of little “books” they have, with a highlighter that follows along, marking each word as it is spoken by the peaceful and friendly-voiced narrator. But aside from that there is too much content to even list properly in a short review! The only downside is that the cute, simple banjo music that plays along behind the story narrations is a bit repetitive, but even then, you can turn it off if you want to. Definite 5 stars, do recommend!
Check out the Khan Academy Kids website for more information and to download their free printables!
Sandy Suggests: Reading Trackers, Incentive Charts, and Incentive Pads
Category: Study Methods, Tools and Hacks
Why Sandy Suggests It:
Everyone knows that people respond to various motivating factors differently. When it comes to encouraging your kids to read, reading trackers with a pre-planned reward may work for some kids and not for others, but trying them is certainly unlikely to do any harm. We have created some that are distinctly for reading Mandarin books and are designed to chop up the challenge into bite-sized, chewable pieces by displaying two categories: encouraging kids to read simple books in Chinese characters only (“一本只有汉字的简单读物”), and then slightly more challenging books with longer sentences that have Chinese characters plus the assist of Pinyin (“一本含有汉字和拼音的短故事书”). We have started out with themes associated with our Tortoise Tile series, the ABCs of Holidays, and more themes will come as we add projects to the catalogue. Our Reading Trackers are available as digital downloads.
If you are looking for reading trackers with just English, you can order them from our favourite teaching supply store, School House Teaching Supplies. (Inquiries: schoolhouseteachingsupplies@shaw.ca) They are often called “Incentive Charts”, which are poster-sized, or you can get them as smaller pads with many tear-off sheets (called “Incentive Pads”). They can be relatively generic designs, or be themed based off of beloved series such as this whole-class reading chart/incentive chart based on the popular graphic novel series Dog Man by Dav Pilkey. (Dog Man is recommended for Grade 2 up to about Grade 5.)