Age of Learning Is Honored by the City of Glendale for Our School Continuity Initiative

I have a long entrepreneurial history in the City of Glendale, having started three companies there: first the Dohring Company, then Neopets, then Age of Learning.

Since I founded Age of Learning 14 years ago, we’ve been proud to call the City of Glendale our home. This week, all of us at Age of Learning were thrilled to receive Glendale Tech Week’s Best Breakthrough Award, which is given to a tech company that successfully pivoted during the pandemic by developing solutions and seeking opportunity in the face of adversity.

We were honored for our School Continuity Initiative, a program we created in March 2020 when schools were forced to close, impacting the academic lives and growth of millions of children. True to our mission to help children everywhere build a strong foundation for academic success and a lifelong love of learning, we created this program to offer preschool through middle school students free home access to our leading digital education programs—ABCmouse, Adventure Academy, and ReadingIQ.

More than 80,000 schools, school districts, and teachers contacted us within days of announcing the School Continuity Initiative–and I’m proud to say that we were able to reach more than 1.2 million children with this initiative. The children who participated in the program not only continued learning while sheltered at home, but they also experienced academic gains.

You can read more about this on the Age of Learning blog…

ABCmouse Search and Explore Educational Animated Series Launches on Tubi Kids

I am thrilled to announce the launch of our new educational animated series: ABCmouse Search and Explore, exclusively on Tubi Kids. Tubi is the world’s largest ad-supported video on demand service.

Based on Age of Learning’s highly popular Search and Explore book series and characters in ABCmouse Early Learning Academy that millions of children have come to love, the new animated series for the first time expands ABCmouse’s educational content to longform storytelling. Search and Explore engages children ages 2 to 8 in the joy of learning and helps develop their skills, knowledge, and vocabulary across academic domains including science, technology, engineering, art, math, music, social studies, and literacy. The first season of Search and Explore launched yesterday with eight original episodes, with additional seasons to be released this summer and beyond.

As children watch each episode, they embark on adventures with ABC Mouse and best friends 1•2•3 Mouse and Do-Re-Mi Mouse to destinations around the world. Every story within Search and Explore introduces children to exciting destinations and new learning topics. The friends slide down the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge, jump over the Statue of Liberty’s hidden broken chains, and hike through the Grand Canyon as they learn about the animals that live there. In one episode, children learn about the history of the Great Wall of China, and in another, about the Amazon River and its ecosystem, plants, and animals. Each episode ends with an engaging original song that pulls together the key learning objectives of the episode.

Age of Learning Partners with Rakuten to Bring ABCmouse English Learning Academy to Children in Japan

I am excited to share the announcement of a major new Age of Learning partnership with Rakuten, Inc., which will bring ABCmouse English Learning Academy to families in Japan.

The new ABCmouse app, which launched yesterday and exclusively available through Rakuten, provides a highly engaging digital program for children ages 3–8 to learn English, a top priority for Japanese parents and educators. This partnership further accelerates Age of Learning’s global growth, building on our success in the U.S., where we’ve helped educate tens of millions of children to date, and in China, where we launched a major partnership with Tencent last year.

The ABCmouse English Learning Academy app has integrated the Rakuten ID authentication and payment platform—with more than 100 million registered consumer accounts—making it easy for parents to subscribe and pay for ABCmouse, log in, and earn Rakuten Super Points for discounts on other Rakuten products and services.

Learn more about the Age of Learning / Rakuten partnership on our company blog …

Age of Learning Brings Comprehensive Disney Publishing Worldwide Library to ReadingIQ, ABCmouse, and Adventure Academy

Reading is such an important part of our educational mission. That’s why all of us at Age of Learning were so thrilled yesterday to announce the addition of many of the best-loved children’s titles from Disney Publishing Worldwide to the thousands of expert-curated books already in our ReadingIQ^® digital library and literacy platform, as well as to ABCmouse.com^® Early Learning Academy and Adventure Academy™.

The comprehensive Disney collection comprises titles from its most popular franchises, including

• Disney: Frozen, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Moana, Mulan, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Winnie the Pooh, The Jungle Book, Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, Doc McStuffins, Lilo & Stitch, Sofia the First, Robin Hood, The Princess and the Frog, Kim Possible, and many more
• Pixar: Toy Story; Cars; The Incredibles; Coco; Finding Nemo; Monsters, Inc.; Brave; Ratatouille; A Bug’s Life; Wall-E; and more
• Marvel: Black Panther, Spider-Man, Avengers, Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hulk, Captain America, and more
• Star Wars: Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and Rogue One

Learn more about this exciting partnership with Disney on the Age of Learning blog…

 

Age of Learning Expanding Opportunity Through Our Education Access Initiatives

Our mission at Age of Learning is simple: helping children everywhere build a strong foundation for academic success and foster a lifelong love of learning. And we measure progress by our ability to increase learning outcomes for all children, particularly those who are furthest from opportunity.

Children from low-income families begin to fall behind their peers in vocabulary development before they’re even two years old. By the time they reach fourth grade, 80 percent of these children are not proficient readers (Source: Campaign for Grade-Level Reading). This learning deficit has long-term effects on children’s academic future, including their likelihood of graduating from high school.

To help address this challenge, Age of Learning has developed a set of Education Access Initiatives to make our educational programs available for free to children whose families may not be able to afford a subscription.

Learn more about the progress of these initiatives here on the Age of Learning blog.

Bring Learning Home Initiative Expands in the Bay Area

The Bring Learning Home Initiative is expanding its reach in the San Francisco Bay Area, providing families throughout the Bay Area with free home access to ABCmouse Early Learning Academy via public libraries. Local families can now “check out” ABCmouse accounts for four weeks at a time from the San José Public Library, San Mateo County Libraries, Contra Costa County Library, and 13 other library systems.

Bring Learning Home is a Tides Foundation initiative that works to help close the access and achievement gaps in education by providing research-validated digital education resources to young learners, with a focus on low-income families.

Through Bring Learning Home, libraries are providing families free at-home access to the research-validated ABCmouse curriculum, including more than 10,000 ABCmouse Learning Activities (hundreds available in Spanish), several standalone mobile apps that can be used without internet connectivity, and digital assessments. The program is designed to increase school readiness and reading proficiency and can be accessed by up to three children per family. Libraries also receive physical books for each branch, training for librarians on the use of digital early education resources, and support for family outreach and education.

Learn more on the Age of Learning blog…

Closing the Achievement Gap with Tips for Preventing Summer Learning Loss

Summer matters. For those months of the year when children aren’t in school, engaging educational experiences can keep them from losing the progress they made. A major challenge during these summer months is ensuring that children retain the knowledge gained during the school year by preventing the “summer slide.”

Research shows that the summer slide has a significant, cumulative impact on academic achievement, particularly for children in low-income households. The summer slide is a key factor behind a stunning statistic: by the end of 5th grade, disadvantaged children are, on average, nearly three grade levels behind their more affluent peers in reading (source: The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading). And, according to the National Summer Learning Association, summer learning loss accounts for two-thirds of the achievement gap in reading between children from low- and middle-income households by 9th grade.

But there is hope. While the school year will start before we know it, there’s still time for children to reinforce what they learned the previous year and prepare for the next one. Engaging and effective learning experiences can help prevent the summer slide by getting children excited to continue learning over their summer break.

Click here to get some helpful tips that families can use to maintain academic achievement over the summer from National Teachers’ Hall of Fame inductee Dr. Rebecca Palacios, Senior Curriculum Advisor at Age of Learning …

ABCmouse Songs Now Available to Stream

Things have been busy, which is good. But that’s meant that I’m more than a bit behind in posting to my blog. I’m going to do my best to catch folks up on what’s been going on with Age of Learning, starting with this post about ABCmouse streaming educational songs…

Music has always been a big part of ABCmouse Early Learning Academy, which offers more than 175 songs that help bring learning to life for children. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce here that our complete collection of ABCmouse music is available on major music platforms worldwide, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, and Google Play. With a listener base of more than 300 million people in more than 100 countries, these platforms expand the reach of ABCmouse to many more families around the world.

The ABCmouse music collection features dozens of original compositions (we’ve always had great musicians and songwriters in the company!), including a song for each letter of the alphabet, songs that teach about numbers, shapes, colors, geography, and much more. The collection also includes many new arrangements of classic children’s songs. We produce and record all our songs in our on-site recording studios in our headquarters in Los Angeles.

Families who want another (joyful) way to learn, can find our music under ABCmouse on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Google Play, Pandora, and several other music platforms. Enjoy!

Age of Learning Wins 3 Gold Stevie Awards for ABCmouse Mastering Math

I’m thrilled to share that Age of Learning has today won three coveted Stevie Awards for our ABCmouse Mastering Math app: Best PreK / Early Childhood Learning Solution, Best Game-based Curriculum Solution, and Best Mathematics Instructional Solution. In January, Mastering Math was named Best Educational App in the Best Mobile App Awards.

Mastering Math is an innovative, game-based adaptive early learning app (available for Apple/iOS and Android mobile devices) that helps preschool through kindergarten children build a strong understanding of the most fundamental math concepts: number sequences, numeral recognition, and counting objects. Having that foundation is a key requirement for success in kindergarten and beyond. The app uses appealing characters and personalized learning pathways to help children achieve mastery through practice.

The app leverages the Personalized Mastery Learning System developed by Age of Learning. This adaptive learning platform recommends and customizes learning games to deliver an individualized learning path and personalized education to every child. The app actively adapts in real time to a child’s existing knowledge, filling in gaps in understanding and teaching new material as the child demonstrates they are ready for more advanced learning activities. Using data from a child’s interaction, the system adapts the sequence of activities presented, and even adapts within each activity, to optimize each child’s learning experience and ultimately help all children achieve math mastery.

Current ABCmouse members can use the Mastering Math app completely free just by logging in. If you are not yet a member, you can subscribe through this app to begin your family’s ABCmouse learning adventure.

Congratulations to everyone on the Mastering Math team at Age of Learning!

5 LA Tech Offices You Need to See to Believe

Age of Learning headquarters, now featuring more than 95,000 sq. ft. of office space, was highlighted today on Built in Los Angeles.

Read the full article here …