Nurture for the Future

Home Learning Resources

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Someone sent me a list of home learning resources through Whatsapp that I thought was particularly useful during this time of school closures. I’ve compiled the list along with some other resources I’ve found through the years that we’ve enjoyed using.

Home Learning Resources
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Free Resources for Home Learning

  • Scholastic has created a free learn-from-home site with 20+ days of learning and activities.
  • Khan Academy – free learning program on a variety of subjects and grade levels.
  • MIT Open Courseware – free audio and video lectures on a variety of subjects (for older students).
  • Language Arts – free lesson plans.
  • Geographic – learn geography.
  • Free curriculum site with everything from preschool activities to 12th grade is here.
  • Quizlet – master any subject.
  • Funbrain – educational games, videos, and books for kids up to 8th Grade.
  • Literactive – games and printables on reading for kids up to Grade 7.
  • Artsology – art games, printables, and educational resources.
  • Literacy and Linguistics – multimedia children’s site from The University of Manchester. It offers a variety of activities and games to learn grammar and parts of speech, along with an animated timeline of the history of the English language.
  • Memory – wide range of courses for learning just about anything.
Home Learning Resources
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Reading Resources:

Math Resources:

These resources are specifically focussed on Math:

Science Resources:

louis-reed-JeInkKlI2Po-unsplash
Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

World Languages:

Keeping Active at Home:

  • Go Noodle – keep the kids moving at home.
  • Body Coach for Kids – workouts for kids to do at home.
  • Cosmic Kids Yoga – Yoga, mindfulness and relaxation designed specially for kids aged 3+, used in schools and homes all over the world.

Music Resources:

Virtual Tours:

Free Home Learning Websites for the Younger Kids:

YouTube Channels:

This is a list of educational youtube channels but they cover content for a wide age-range. I suggest you check these for age-appropriateness for your kids, especially if you have younger children.

Paid Online Resources for Home Learning:

  • BrainPop – covers a variety of subjects and is currently offering free access during school closures.
  • IXL – personalised learning from Pre-K to Grade 12.
  • Curiosity Stream – paid subscription for documentaries online.
  • Tynker – paid subscription for coding games.
  • Outschool – pay per class, live online classes for kids 3-18 years.
  • Udemy – paid courses online.
  • iReady – paid programs for mainly for maths, reading, and writing.
  • Beast Academy – Math program currently offering a promo for school closures (Promo Code: FlattenTheCurve)
  • Creative Bug – paid arts and craft lessons (free trial available).
Home Learning
Photo by Thomas Kolnowski on Unsplash

More Resources:

Plague Inc

I wanted to add this here because it’s pretty relevant to what’s happening currently. Plague Inc is a game where you are the pathogen infecting the world. To win, you need to wipe out the world before it can come up with a cure for you. Through an immersive game-play, students can learn about infectious diseases, how they can evolve to become more infectious and deadly, and what global policies can be put in place to prevent its spread.

Can you infect the world? Plague Inc. is a unique mix of high strategy and terrifyingly realistic simulation.

Your pathogen has just infected ‘Patient Zero’. Now you must bring about the end of human history by evolving a deadly, global Plague whilst adapting against everything humanity can do to defend itself.

Brilliantly executed with innovative gameplay and built from the ground up for iPhone & iPad, Plague Inc. evolves the strategy genre and pushes mobile gaming (and you) to new levels. It’s You vs. the world – only the strongest can survive!

Plague Inc is also available as a board game:

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Skoove: Online Piano Courses for Everyone

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Skoove provides online piano courses through an e-learning platform. Founded in 2014, their mission is to make music education accessible to everyone regardless of income or education. We were recently given the opportunity to trial the app in our home and we’d like to share our experiences.

About Skoove

Skoove online piano courses

Firstly, a little more about Skoove and how it works…

Skoove is an online program that provides piano lessons in an interactive way. The program provides guidance and feedback, either through the app on iOS or through a web browser on a laptop or computer. It is designed so that anyone of any age can develop their piano or keyboard skills. Skoove teaches theoretical music knowledge and the principles of composition and freestyle playing; this includes how to read music sheets and tips to compose they’re own original music. Through carefully crafted lessons, Skoove combines theory with practice, allowing students to learn how to play the piano with their favourite music pieces.

Skoove online piano courses

Regardless of skill-level or taste in music, Skoove offers 19 different courses, over 400 lessons, and hundreds of popular tracks. As students are playing, Skoove’s audio-analysis algorithm will analyse their playing technique through the microphone on their smartphone, iPad, or computer. Each student will receive personalised feedback together with guidance to help them learn the correct technique. Students may also request an individual consultation by Skoove’s own music teacher.

Skoove online piano courses

Out of the millions of lessons played Skoove extracts new, quantifiable results concerning the students’ progress. These results are used in developing individual learning methods that are being directly integrated into the curriculum. Skoove’s didactic concept combines established music education with the possibilities of modern digital technology.  

Our Thoughts on Skoove

We have tried a number of music programs for the boys before and this is what we liked best about Skoove:

  • Skoove is a true music learning program. It not only teaches you how to play the piano but it also provides information about piano theory. This allows you to take your knowledge and apply it to any sheet music.
  • Each lesson provides a graduated process for learning a song on the piano. Each song is broken into segments. Players will learn to play each segment with single hands in their own time and progress in a step-by-step fashion towards playing the whole song with both hands in time with the accompanying music.
  • Corresponding hands on the piano. Skoove allows you to see where your hands should be on the piano and which fingers you should use to play each note.
  • Wide coverage of lesson material. Skoove provides lessons suitable for beginner players with no experience to intermediate players with some learning experience to advanced players with significant knowledge of piano playing. You can choose to start at any level you are comfortable with.
  • Skoove is interactive. It allows you to get direct feedback on your playing.
  • Personally, I like that the notes don’t move while you’re playing them. For a number of piano programs we have tried, the musical notation usually scrolls across the screen from right to left as you play the music.

What Could be Better

There were a few things I thought could be better:

  • If you’re a student with some piano experience, you need to work out which lesson to start with. For instance, I’ve studied piano up to Grade 5 but I wasn’t sure if that placed me in the intermediate or advanced lessons. For G1 and G2 who have not followed a traditional piano program, I have even less of an idea where to start them.
  • For the lessons where the program waits for you to play the notes correctly, it sometimes has difficulty detecting the note. For instance, if I have to play a chord (say C, E, G), even if I play the chord correctly, it might not be able to detect that I’ve played the C note. I have to hit the key quite hard to get the app to detect it. Since we have an electronic piano, I am not sure if it is a fault of the electric piano or the iPad microphone. We have yet to try the app on a real piano to see if the feedback is better. Regardless of the reason, the program’s inability to detect the note played can make this part of the learning process quite tedious.
G2 trying the beginner lessons on Skoove
  • It would be nice to have a feature that allows you to adjust the pace of the music so you can slow it down if you aren’t ready to play the music at its natural pace. Currently, the app only allows you to play the music “on-hold” where it waits until you play the notes correctly, or at the normal pace of the song.
  • There does not appear to be an option to set up individual profiles for the whole family to use the app. While not impossible, it does make it less convenient for the kids to keep track of their own lessons when we’re all using the same app. I could be wrong about this – perhaps I’ve missed the settings for it.

Features I’m “On the Fence” About

  • In another program we used, we were given three stars at the end of a lesson to tell us how well we’ve done and how much room for improvement there is. While it’s good to know how we’re progressing, I found that it sometimes distracted G2 from the real goal of the lesson – to learn. He would get upset if he didn’t finish a lesson with 3 stars and would be determined to hit three stars whatever the cost. A feature that was designed to help him learn better was having the opposite result of distracting him from the learning. Skoove does not provide a starred assessment at the end of each lesson. You can decide whether this is a feature you prefer to have or not.

Skoove Free Trial

Skoove is offering a free trial so you can give the program a go before deciding if you would like to continue with a paid membership. Membership fees are available at:

  • 1 month – $19.99/month
  • 3 months – $13.99/month
  • 12 months – $9.99/month

Find out more…

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Active Screen Time: PokemonGo for Developing Logic and Reasoning

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A while back, G1 wrote us a thousand-word essay expounding the benefits of playing Pokemon Go. After joining him on this quest to see what all the fuss is about, I have some new benefits to add to the list. Coming fresh from the last post’s discussion about the benefit of active screen time, I think this is an excellent example.

If you’re not at all interested in PokemonGo or anything related, then you can skip ahead. The point of the following is to illustrate the complexity of the game and the thought required to assemble a winning Pokemon team. There are plenty of other games that also require kids to exercise their logic and reasoning. Sometimes, the only way to find out just how complex they can get is to play them yourself. The additional benefit is that it gives you something else to talk about with your kids.

Active Screen Time Benefits: How PokemonGo Develops Logic and Reasoning

Niantic recently added a new task to PokemonGo. Players have to challenge Team Rocket with 3 different levels – Grunt, Leader, and Giovanni (the Boss). The challenge requires players to choose three of their Pokemon to face off against Team Rocket’s Pokemon.

Team Rocket

When choosing your Pokemon, you need to take several factors into consideration:

Pokemon Type

There are 18 different types of Pokemon – normal, rock, ground, fairy, ice, fire, grass, electric, steel, dragon, dark, ghost, poison, flying, fighting, psychic, water, and bug. Each type of Pokemon has strengths and weaknesses.

Pokemon strength & weaknesses2

Pokemon strength & weaknesses

Pokemon strength & weaknesses3

When you’re choosing your Pokemon, you want to select the Pokemon that is strong against your opponent’s Pokemon. Since your opponent’s Pokemon will also be attacking back, you need to make sure that your Pokemon is resistant to that Pokemon’s attack.

PokémongoPokémongo

Some Pokemon are a single type, like Melmetal (above left) is a Steel-type. Others might be a mix of two types, like Dragonite (above right) is a Dragon/Flying-type Pokemon. When challenging a double type Pokemon, you need to take into consideration both types.

Pokemon Move Sets

Each Pokemon comes with two move sets – a fast attack and a charge attack. When your Pokemon attacks your opponent’s Pokemon, you will have to use the fast attack until your charge attack is ready. How long it takes your charge attack to power up depends on the charge move you have. Some are faster than others.

Pokémongo

The move sets may be the same as the Pokemon-type, or they may be different. In the example above, Tyranitar is a Rock/Dark-type Pokemon with a Steel fast attack and a Dark charge attack. However, Tyranitar could have any combination of the following move sets:

Tyranitar move sets

If you know that you could be facing a Tyranitar, you need to be aware of the possible different move types this Pokemon could have.

Attack Speed

How quickly you can power up your Pokemon’s charge attack is also important because each side receives two shields. Shields can be used to block charge attacks which are more powerful than the fast attack. One good charge attack can finish off a Pokemon in one go. If your charge attack is too slow, your opponent can activate his charge attack and force you to use a shield first. The first person to run out of shields is at a disadvantage.

Combat Power (CP)

This is how strong your Pokemon is. Even if you have a Pokemon with the right Type and Move Sets, if its Combat Power is low, you will still have trouble defeating your opponent’s Pokemon.

Individual Value (IV)

This refers to how good your Pokemon is. A Pokemon’s IV is on a 100 point scale, with 0 being the worst and 100 being the best. Obviously a Pokemon with a higher IV is better than one with a lower IV.

Weather Boost

Image Source: Pinterest

Certain weather conditions can make your Pokemon more effective when it fights. When the weather favours your particular Pokemon’s type, your Pokemon’s moves will be more effective at taking down your opponent’s Pokemon.

The Pokemon in Your Collection

Knowing which is the ideal Pokemon is pointless if you don’t have that Pokemon in your collection. You can only choose from the Pokemon that you have. If you need a Fighting-type Pokemon but all your Fighting-type Pokemon are weak or they have the wrong move sets, this strategy won’t work for you.

Choosing Your Pokemon Team

When you’re facing your opponent, you want to choose a Pokemon that is strong against your opponent’s Pokemon but also resistant to your opponent’s Pokemon attack. You also want a Pokemon with high CP and IV, and a fairly quick charge attack. Since you have three Pokemon to face off each other, you need to select a team that is strong enough to face the different Pokemon in your opponent’s team. If your Pokemon can’t defeat the other Pokemon before they faint, you lose.

Pokemon Team Selection Challenge

Since both G1 and G2 enjoy playing PokemonGo, I challenged them to come up with their recommendations for the best team to face Team Rocket. It was interesting to see that they both came up with similar strategies which they had to adapt to the Pokemon that I was limited to in my collection.

Putting them to the task of figuring out the best Pokemon lineup is a logic and reasoning puzzle in itself. Best of all, they were both falling over themselves to be the first to complete the task.

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Kano Star Wars – Using the Force to Code

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We’ve always been fond of Kano – the company that produced fun kits that encourages kids to learn how to code.

It all started with the Kano Computer Kit we backed on Kickstarter:

Kano computer coding kit

Followed by the Kano Pixel Light Kit:

 

 
 
 
 
 
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#art in #light – a project G1 has been working on with the #Kano #pixelkit #techart #digitalart #figur8 #nurtureforthefuture

A post shared by Shen-Li Lee (@figur8) on

Then we bought the Kano Harry Potter Coding Kit for G2’s birthday (and thought it was so cool, we also gave it to my nephew for his birthday):

Kano Harry Potter coding wand

Kano Star Wars – The Force Coding Kit

Recently, Kano launched the Star Wars Force Coding Kit:

Similar to the Harry Potter Coding Kit, the Star Wars kit is paired to an app that is available for your desktop, laptop, or tablet.

Kano Star Wars Features:

  • Teaches children to code and create as they navigate endless Star Wars adventures, learning the ways of the force.
  • Like Jedi apprentices who must learn to make their own lightsabers, kids must put together their own sensors. Along the way, they will learn how sensors work.
  • No prior coding experience is necessary as children will learn to code through simple steps that teach them about loops, logic, and variables.
  • Choose the light side or the dark side and make your way from learner to master. Explore the force using code and hand-controlled characters and starships.
  • Children can share their coded adventures with the Star Wars Kano world community.
  • Recommended for children ages 6+, this kit works on recent iPads, Macs, Windows 10 computers, fire 10 tablets and selected other devices. Visit kano.me for details.

Admittedly, Star Wars has always been more to my interest than the boys. If your child isn’t a Star Wars fan, you can also try the Kano Frozen Kit. It’s similar in concept to the Kano Star Wars Kit, but now your child is Elsa, controlling the elements with their hands and a Kano motion sensor.

Kano Frozen 2 coding kit

More Products by Kano:

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Prodigy Math – RPG that Helps Kids Learn Math

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There is a misconception pervasive in our understanding of Math. I’ve often heard it said, “I’m not a numbers person” or “Math is just no my subject”. It becomes that subject to get through and be discarded at first opportunity.

Math is like anything else in life that we do. Everyone starts at different levels – some of us start out better at it and some of us need more work to get better at it. Just like swimming, some of us take to the water like fish while others flounder around a bit more until we have lessons. At the end of the day, if we get the proper attention and practice, we do get better at it.

To help the kids get more exposure to math, but in a fun way, I’ve always looked out for cool and interesting math programs (check out the list at the end of this post). Prodigy Math is one that we have used that I have been most impressed with in terms of curriculum coverage, parent dashboard and pull factor.

Prodigy uses the RPG (role-playing game) format which has been used quite successfully in other educational games, like Chemcaper. I feel that RPGs offer an added level of engagement that other game-style educational apps lack. The desire to follow the adventure and see where the story takes you is a powerful motivator that brings the kids back for more math practice.

Prodigy Math

Prodigy Game

Prodigy Math is a role-playing game that teaches children Maths while they journey through a mythical land. Success in the game depends on correctly answering skill-building questions. Along the way, they can collect rewards, go on quests and play with friends. The gist of the story goes like this:

Your child plays a character who is about to attend The Academy to learn magic. A friend, name Noot, guides your child through the story. When the story begins, your child has to choose a pet who will help fight in magic battles. As your child is about to enter a portal to The Academy, an evil character called The Puppetmaster appears. He steals the keystones that keep the portal open and scatters them across the land. Your child’s quest is to collect the keystones while fighting monsters along the way with the power of Math.

Prodigy Math
Prodigy Math

Math Features:

  • Content is tailored to each child’s strengths and weaknesses. Prodigy is adaptive and sets the questions harder or easier depending on your child’s skill level, what they’re struggling with and what they’ve mastered.
  • Questions are fully aligned with state-level curricula, including Common Core and TEKS, so Prodigy is always connected to the classroom.
  • 1,400 available skills give students the chance to learn more and keep growing.

Prodigy Math cover the curriculum from Grade 1 to Grade 8. The full list of math skills covered can be found at: https://www.prodigygame.com/Math/Skills/

Parent Features:

The Prodigy Math Parent Dashboard allows parents to:

  • See what math practice your child is working on
  • Monitor your child’s understanding and progress
  • Set goals and give reward to encourage even more math practice
  • Choose between locking the curriculum with a grade override so that your child only works on questions within a set grade, or to have no override so that your child advances to the next level once they’ve mastered specific topics.
Prodigy Game
Prodigy Maths

The best thing about Prodigy is that it is free to use. There is a paid membership but it does not exclude you from any of the educational content if you choose not to subscribe. The benefits of being a premium member are that children level up faster, spend more time answering math questions and get exclusive access to pets, member-only game areas and extra rewards. These extra features are designed to increase your child’s motivated to practice.

Game Play

This is a brief video on how to get started:

Our Experience

I registered the kids for the free membership and agreed to subscribe for a year if they made the commitment to use the app. For my kids, the biggest pull factor that got them to keep going and practicing their math was what they called “the storyline”. Once they reached the point where the storyline stopped (because the rest was still in development), they started to get bored. While the rewards were helpful, it was not nearly as powerful as the storyline for pulling them back to the game.

We left the app for about a year and returned to it when a new section of the storyline was released. I could see the motivation was much higher with the new storyline because G2 started hitting the goals I set for him in two days.

Prodigy is a great Math app for encouraging Math practice but I hope the developers will focus on extending the storyline further.

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Math Apps:

These are some of the math apps we’ve used in the past that the boys have enjoyed playing with:

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Philips Sonicare Kids Brush

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I know… for an ex-dentist, I don’t write a lot about children’s oral health. We’ve been using manual toothbrushes for the longest time and I’d never thought much about it until my brother put this on my radar – the Philips Sonicare Kids electric toothbrush.

It’s been around for a while now so this is certainly old news, but the boys have been using it for nearly a year now so I figured it would be a good time to review how well it’s been working for them.

Electric vs Manual

First things first, electric toothbrushes cost more than a manual toothbrush so do we even really need one? When I was in dental school, the answer was “no”. As long as you took care to brush your teeth well, there was no difference between the electric brush and the manual one. Unless you’re a kid or anyone with manual dexterity difficulties. In these instances, an electric brush will definitely do the job better.

Admittedly, it has been over 20 years now since I was last in dental school so the facts have altered somewhat. According to Consumer Reports, some 56 studies have found that electric toothbrushes have an edge over manual ones. However, that edge is not significant unless you already have gingivitis (a mild form of gum disease). If you are disease-free, then a manual toothbrush will serve you just as well.

Compared with manual toothbrushes, electrics reduced dental plaque 21 percent more and gingivitis (inflammation of the gums) 11 percent more after three months of use, the team from Cochrane found.

Consumer Reports

G1 and G2 were 11 and 8 respectively when they first started using the
Philips Sonicare Kids electric toothbrush. They definitely old enough to have mastered the art of toothbrushing and manual dexterity should not have been an issue. Were they brushing regularly and well enough? Now that is an interesting question I do not have the answer to.

Tooth Decay Versus Gum Disease

First things first, we should go back to basics. Brushing your teeth serves two purposes:

  1. To prevent tooth decay; and
  2. To prevent gum disease

Although, strictly speaking, brushing your teeth is really for preventing gum disease. Plaque bacteria likes to grow along the gum line where it irritates the gums and causes gum disease if it is left undisturbed for too long. It is the action of the brush that removes the plaque and protects the gums from damage.

Toothpaste (containing fluoride) is the stuff that prevents tooth decay. All you really need to do is smear a dab of toothpaste all over your teeth with your finger and that would work as effectively.

So there you go – tooth decay and gum disease in a nutshell. When we talk about the effectiveness of a toothbrush, we’re really only talking about it in terms of preventing gum disease.

How to Brush Your Teeth Well

The next question that begs asking is “how well do you need to brush your teeth to stave off disease?” To be realistic, it is impossible to remove all plaque from your mouth. What we’re really doing (as one of my lecturers once said) is simply moving the plaque around. We’re moving it away from the gum line with a toothbrush so our gums have a chance to recover before more plaque builds up again.

Frequency

How frequently do we need to clear the plaque? According to the studies when I was in dental school, it was once every other day. Where did we hear that we had to brush our teeth twice a day or after every meal? From the manufacturers who wanted us to use more product. Although I would probably make it a habit to brush daily because it’s easy to forget if you’re working on alternate days.

Duration

How long do we need to brush for each time? To do an effective job of cleaning your teeth, you need to brush for two minutes. When you’re cleaning your teeth, that’s a pretty long time. I don’t think many people hit the two minute mark; kids would be even less so. In all honesty, I don’t brush my teeth for two minutes. The only time I ever took more than two minutes was when I had braces and I had to thread dental floss under the wires to floss my teeth.

This is where an electric toothbrush can come in handy. The Philips Sonicare Kids electric toothbrush is programmed to buzz at two minutes so your child knows when he’s been brushing for long enough.

Method

As mentioned earlier, the purpose of brushing your teeth is to remove plaque build up along the gum line. To do that, we need to aim the toothbrush bristles at the gum line and either make small jiggly movements or tiny circles. We start on the cheek side of the top right and move around the arch of teeth to the top left. Then we move to the tongue side of the top right and repeat the process all the way around to the top left. Repeat with the bottom teeth. Give the biting surfaces a scrub to remove any food debris from the crevices and you’re done.

Making jiggly or circular movements can be tricky, not to mention tedious, for young kids. It is much easier to scrub with a horizontal action across the teeth. I know, because I was a kid that did that even though I was taught to use the jiggly movements. An electric toothbrush will make the jiggly movements for your child. All they have do is hold the brush in place and slowly move it around.

The Philips Sonicare Kids Electric Toothbrush

What I like best about the Philips Sonicare Kids electric toothbrush is the app that accompanies it. When the kids brush their teeth, they have to play a tooth brushing video that shows them which part of their mouth their toothbrush should be at all times. The video teaches them to clean their teeth by quadrants – starting with the upper right teeth for 30 seconds, followed by the upper left teeth for 30 seconds, then the lower left teeth for 30 seconds, finally the lower right teeth for 30 seconds.

The app is also a really fancy tooth brushing sticker chart. Every day your child brushes her teeth, she can collect points, earn achievements, and unlock rewards for her sparkly (which is like her pet tooth on the app).

It is kind of gimmicky but it had both boys captivated for a while. G1 is still religiously collecting his points and rewards, but G2 has long given up using the app. App and rewards aside, G2 is much better with brushing his teeth (without Mama nagging) so that’s a win for me.

Overview on the Philips Sonicare Kids Electric Toothbrush:

  • Interactive free app educates and gets kids excited abour brushing. Exciting rewards for successful brushing sessions.
  • 91% of dental professional parents prefer Sonicare for Kids for their own children. Speed – Up to 62000 brush movement/min.
  • 98% of parents say it’s easier to get kids to brush longer and better
  • Patented sonic technology with 500 strokes per second. 75% more effective than manual toothbrushes in hard to reach areas for better check-ups guaranteed.
  • KidTimer helps ensure 2 minute recommended brushing time, and KidPacer alerts the child to move to the next quadrant of the mouth to ensure a thorough cleaning.

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