Khan Academy Kids: an entertaining educational app for your 2-8(?)yo
Probably the best in its category, A+ for entertainment, Aish for education and with the benefit of being relatively hands-off for parents
Khan Academy Kids! If you’re looking for a screen babysitter, this will do a great job. It’s as engaging as whatever show you’re considering, but has the bonus feature of helping you feel like your kid may be learning something while they’re at it. It’s also not as hectic as many kids’ shows.
It’s also free, which is awesome, and its creators are obviously very clever and ambitious people with a genuine passion for kids’ education. It is responsive to your child’s progress, covers a broad range of topics (learning letters/basic reading, reading books, maths, and logic puzzles), and has an engaging but non-gaudy aesthetic (I feel this is important: kids aren’t idiots and don’t need things hurled into their eyeballs and ears from screens).
Its stated age range is 2-8yo; our experience is that it will best entertain kids from 2 to maybe 4/5 years old (depending on their reading level), and help with teaching your kids from the 3 to 5 year old range, depending on how much exposure they’ve already had to numbers, letters etc.
If you’re wanting to use it for purely entertainment/edutainment purposes, you can just choose the age level that they’re at, and let them loose on the app. They can either select their own topics, or be guided through the app’s (responsive algorithm) sequence.
If you want to lean more in an educational direction, I would suggest playing a more active role by selecting which topics they do. It’s possible you’ll need to adjust levels for each topic, as your kid may be more or less advanced in some.
Specifically, here’s how I recommend driving KAK if you want to get the most “educational” value:
Skip
The coloring! Oh, the hours we spent coloring at school!
Reading books. Theoretically kids can choose to read the app’s books themselves, or have them read to them. This falls more into edutainment, really, so not something necessary if you’re optimizing for educational time on the app. Although our three year old loved listening to the non-fiction books all about baby animals! We’ll see how much she remembers.
Decent (but not perfect)
The letter/reading sections. KAK doesn’t focus enough on phonics. Perhaps to better align with school curricula? I don’t know. But they emphasize teaching kids the names of letters and sight words over phonics, and the latter is a far more respectful way to teach kids to read! If this is going to be your kid’s first or main exposure to early reading, that is a-okay and it will all be great. But if I’m allowed to be a perfectionist, I don’t think it’s done as well as it could, given the general calibre of the app and its producers.
Logic puzzles. We don’t actively seek out these kinds of things as educational material. Are they important? Probably for passing certain exams. They seem to be the kind of thing that some people believe tracks with intelligence, but maybe not? The most value I’ve gotten from them is finding it cool when my kid understands the logic, like “hey yay that’s awesome!” but not “oh damn let’s teach her how to remember where things are in this memory game so she can ace it next time.”
Good
Maths. This covers the basics of numeracy nicely, and in a way that is less demanding of parents than other resources I’ve discussed.1 Which is obviously not an insignificant benefit.
Overall, this is a neat app that does a nice job of covering the basics. Compared to other tools we’ll discuss, you don’t need to play a very active role in assisting with the teaching. So, a great option for many parents!
If we could suggest some improvements, it would be to amp up the phonics, and to allow parents to select what topics - and at what % - are featured in the sequence, in order to maximize its educational value. For us, that would mean a lot of time spent on maths, a little on logic, a little on literacy, and maybe the odd book thrown in for fun.