Schools are closed, but that does not mean learning should stop.
If you’ve never homeschooled your kids before, don’t despair. There are great online resources to help you design a homeschool-based curriculum and keep your little ones learning during the pandemic.
In this article, we’ve scoured the internet to find you the best educational apps you can use while your kids are at home. All you need is a mobile phone and internet connection to open the world of digital learning which brims with great apps for learning- with topics ranging from simple phonics to revising for the SATs!
The best part? You don’t have to pay a dime for your kids to learn using most of these apps. The only exceptions are for apps that offer premium content or charge a few bucks to remove ads.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is one of the best comprehensive educational apps for homeschooling. Its reputation for free, high-quality schooling resources makes it one of the best homeschooling apps for children from lower grades to high schoolers.
Khan Academy provides a huge range of educational content, with thousands of articles, exercises, and videos for learners to devour. Its major focus is math and science but also includes a fair bit of arts, humanities, and college prep classes in the mix.
For math classes, learners can choose topics based on their grades for topics such as arithmetic, calculus, or trigonometry, while the science classes cover subjects ranging from physics to biology and chemistry.
The app has a rich blend of text, images, and video, which makes it easy for learners to understand even the most challenging topics. To add a bit of routine and structured learning, it also has daily lesson plans and schedules.
Duolingo
Duolingo isn’t just tailored for adult learners but is also well suited to help your little learners pick up another language in no time.
Duolingo app makes learning languages easy and fun, thanks to its bite-sized lessons, sleek user interface, and fun rewarding system.
The app features lessons in Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Czech, Welsh, Greek, and much more.
Though it has a web interface, Duolingo is best suited for smartphones and tablets where learners can listen, interact with the app, and earn some virtual rewards.
Duolingo has a completely free version and a premium version. The free version is comprehensive but has ads that can be removed by going premium.
Quizlet
Quizlet is a great app for kids to learn, revise, and practice all subjects they’ve been learning in school. Children learn with flashcards, get tested, and are also able to keep in touch with their classmates using the app.
This app serves as a great tool for subjects that need memorization such as geography, foreign languages, vocabulary, and history.
Quizlet is free but comes with in-app purchases.
Homer reader
Best suited for children between ages 2 and 8, Homer reader app helps kids who are still learning how to read do it in a fun way. It features lessons on phonics, ABCs, sight words, songs, drawings, and much more. It also has hundreds of stories, printable certificates, and worksheets.
Because of the great visual prompts and verbal instructions, pre-readers can use this app independently without any help.
Homer reader is free to download but requires a paid subscription to access the educational content. You can however get a 30-day trial which lets you try its features before subscribing.
Math Games
With 21+ math-related games, Math Games does what almost seems impossible – that is- making math learning so much fun! It’s excellent for parents who want to supplement the math their kids have been learning at school in a fun way.
Learners in the app are able to practice math by choosing topics based on their grades: from Pre-Kindergarten to eighth grade or by their skills from addition and subtraction to mixed equations. Their searches are also filtered by skill and grade.
Math app has a smart reporting system where progress is reported every time learners log into their accounts and do their assignments. This helps parents create targeted assignments and also view their kid’s progress. This is a great app for co-parents as they can individually monitor and keep up with the kid’s progress during their parenting time.
GoNoodle
GoNoodle app is great for mindfulness and movement videos. It offers a replacement for school gym classes aiming at providing children with academic, physical, and social-emotional activities for mindfulness and wellness.
The app has instructions that show how different games should be played and the physical benefits of learning. This captures the student’s attention and nicely integrates the idea of physical exercises and academic performance.
For tracking students’ progress, the app has a tally that keeps track of each activity done, points gained and the medals won which acts as a fun incentive.
Finally
Homeschooling doesn’t have to be overwhelming. There are a lot of apps and other free educational resources on the internet to help your kids continue learning even when the schools are closed.
