Announcing Homeschool+, a Comprehensive New Program for Home Educators

Yesterday, Age of Learning announced the launch of Homeschool+™, an innovative new program that provides home educators with resources and tools to guide their child’s education and inspire a lifelong love of learning. Developed for children ages 4-8, Homeschool+ offers a comprehensive curriculum, adaptive math and reading learning programs, and robust home educator tools for planning lessons and tracking progress, customizable to meet each family’s unique homeschooling needs.

The Homeschool+ curriculum features Age of Learning’s research-validated digital learning solutions My Math Academy, and My Reading Academy. Based on well-established principles of learning science research, these programs enable young children to master essential math concepts and build foundational literacy skills. They help accelerate learning by identifying each child’s strengths and growth opportunities, then dynamically adapting the selection and sequence of learning experiences to meet each child’s needs.

In addition to math and reading, Homeschool+ offers art, science, social studies, language arts, music, and Spanish. These additional courses, all designed by education experts, feature content from ABCmouse’s award-winning, research-validated curriculum, augmented by lesson plans that take full advantage of the learning opportunities of the home environment. Home educators can select from a broad variety of lessons to address their children’s interests, each one offering online and offline learning activities.

Learn more about Homeschool+ at https://www.homeschoolplus.com.

How My Math Academy More than Doubled Math Skills in Texas School District

Over the past year, Age of Learning’s new Schools Division has been successfully rolling out My Math Academy—an innovative personalized, adaptive math program for pre-K through second grade—in schools and districts across the U.S. Pilot programs have included the Los Angeles Unified School District, Chapel Hill Academy, Lakeport Unified School District, and EPIC Charter Schools, where it has driven significant gains in students’ math skills.

But it’s the company’s latest pilot program in a relatively small district that’s been garnering outsized excitement and interest. More than 900 mostly economically disadvantaged pre-K students in the Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District in Texas, started using My Math Academy during the pandemic in the fall of 2020. As reported on the Government Technology magazine website, “math skills more than doubled for 4-year-old pre-K students and tripled for 3-year-olds. The average pre-K student aged 4 is now at mid-kindergarten level, while the average pre-K student aged 3 is approaching kindergarten-level math skills.”

According to the Director of Early Childhood for the school district, My Math Academy, which includes a robust teacher dashboard, is giving teachers unparalleled insights into the learning needs of each individual student. She also praised the program for allowing students to learn at their own pace and giving teachers more flexibility to move towards a more individualized approach to instruction.

Read more about it on GovTech.com …

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.

Doug Dohring Announces the Age of Learning Foundation at the Education World Forum

I am proud to announce, here on my blog, the creation of the Age of Learning Foundation, a charitable organization committed to helping children furthest from opportunity build a strong academic foundation by providing access to research-proven educational programs at no cost. I made the official announcement at the Education World Forum in London earlier this week, in an address to Ministers of Education of more than half of the countries of the world, representing nearly one billion children. The Foundation pledged to support up to five partner nations in 2020.

The Foundation will provide free access to Age of Learning’s research-proven mathematics and English language learning programs, including our flagship product ABCmouse. ABCmouse has helped educate more than 20 million children to date, and 20 research studies—including multiple randomized controlled trials—have shown that it significantly improves early literacy and math skills. Additionally, the Foundation will offer Age of Learning’s world-class digital library with thousands of high-value books in English, with the opportunity to include local, culturally appropriate titles in partner nations’ native languages. Age of Learning has also developed a patented personalized, adaptive digital learning system that powers its programs with AI-driven technology.

You can learn more about our new Foundation 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…

ABCmouse Adds Major New Features for Teachers and Schools

As part of Age of Learning‘s commitment to help children everywhere build a strong foundation for academic success, we offer ABCmouse at no cost to teachers for use in their classrooms. For schools and districts, ABCmouse for Schools adds full home access for students, custom curriculum alignment, performance reporting, professional development, and more.

During the last school year, more than 145,000 teachers—including 1 in 4 kindergarten teachers in the U.S.—serving millions of students used ABCmouse in their classrooms. Students completed more than 100 million ABCmouse Learning Activities during the year.

For the 2018-2019 school year, we developed the following new features and capabilities for ABCmouse for Teachers and ABCmouse for Schools. You can learn more about these features from the following posts on the Age of Learning blog:

1. Digital Library Experience 
2. Standards-Aligned Collections
3. A New Teacher Experience
4. ABCmouse Ambassador Program

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!