Learning English with Kids Academy

Source: britishcouncil.org

Babies are born hardwired to learn language. Even though it might not seem like it, infants are listening to every sound we make, so they can eventually start making those sounds themselves. As children grow older, they use the information they learned about sounds, words, and sentences, and begin associating them with printed letters. This is especially where they need help from parents, caregivers, and teachers to continue moving their learning forward, as the more exposure to language, the better!

Learning a second language is no different but can be more challenging if the child doesn’t regularly hear the new language in their environment. Whether kids are working to build their literacy in their native language, or learning a second one, there’s no question that they need all the help they can get to build a solid foundation for literacy and future learning.

The English language arts (ELA) curriculum in the Talented and Gifted app by Kids Academy was designed to supplement your little learner’s language acquisition and early literacy skills regardless of if they are learning a second language or boosting their skills in their native tongue. A wide variety of lessons, games, videos, and worksheets act to enhance every child’s ELA skills.

Enhancing Early Literacy with the Talented and Gifted App

Source: novakid.com

When toddlers learn to talk and say their ABCs, we don’t often think of this as them learning a language, but that’s exactly what they’re doing! To be fully literate and successful in any academic pursuit, children must master their primary language.

The Talented and Gifted app offers a whole host of ELA resources that are perfect for kids from preschool through grade school. Worksheets, such as the below examples take students who are just beginning their learning journey and walks them through meaningful activities that build their skills from matching sounds with letters to building sentences and reading comprehension.

The first worksheet above is designed with the needs of toddlers and preschoolers in mind since the youngest learners are unable to read. These children learn to match letters with the sounds they make by viewing familiar pictures. As kids progress in their reading skills, they learn to string sight words together by reading high-frequency words and creating sentences. As they perfect their literacy, they build reading comprehension while learning to read and understand informational texts or follow a plot in fiction.

Early literacy also includes the basics of grammar so kids learn more about the structure of words and how they fit together in more complex sentences. Beginnings and endings of words, such as prefixes and suffixes can change the meaning of words to make them fit better into more precise sentences, as shown in this video.

The app also includes interactive elements to make learning more fun! Games embedded throughout the lessons within the app motivate children as gameplay feels more like play.

The game above helps to reinforce the different parts of speech to increase a child’s knowledge about how words function within sentences. This helps them to understand how to form sentences to effectively communicate. Moreover, children don’t even know they’re learning because they’re having too much fun playing games and solving puzzles!

The interactive quizzes also serve to reinforce and assess learning in a way that feel more like a game. In this quiz, kids drag and drop words to form compound words:

With so many ways to learn, Kids Academy delivers a complete ELA course that takes kids from basic phonics to building vocabulary, constructing sentences and paragraphs, and reading comprehension.

Learning English as a Second Language with the Talented and Gifted App

Source: english.com

Children learning English as a second language need a lot of practice and repetition to build vocabulary and understanding. A parent or teacher can never have too many free english worksheets, as learning a second language takes time and practice!

The Talented and Gifted app also has activities that can help second language learners flourish. To start, kids must learn the English alphabet and the sounds each letter makes. Worksheets like this one help kids to learn letters and match sounds to words:

Kids Academy also has lessons and worksheets that help children build vocabulary. Learning a second language often entails learning as many high frequency words as possible before moving into tricky grammar rules and sentence building. Worksheets that pair pictures of well-known items and animals can assist kids in learning new words that are of high interest to them.

Abstract concepts, such as emotions, can be especially difficult for second language learners to master because they describe how someone feels, instead of by something more tangible, like objects or animals. Worksheets like this one help to illustrate the concept in a way a child understands:

On the above worksheet, learners can easily see the emotions on each character’s face and are able to associate them with the common feelings of happiness and sadness. By making this connection between the new vocabulary word and a familiar feeling from prior experience, they are more likely to remember the new foreign words.

Additionally, exciting videos engage kids with common and comfortable topics that make learning a second language less scary and a lot more fun! This video teaches kids to learn the word for the color green without overwhelming them with words they don’t know.

As you can see, the Talented Gifted app provides second language learners with valuable tools to learn the basics of English, including letters, their sounds, and a ton of new vocabulary!

Taken together, Kids Academy offers parents, caregivers, and teachers an app to learn English that features a vast array of resources enhancing ELA skills for both native speakers and those who are new to the language. Find all this and more on the Talented and Gifted app, available on the AppStore and on Google Play.