ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy
© 2010 Age of Learning, Inc.
Solid but expensive, this is a subscription-based curriculum for preschool through kindergarten children that lets you explore a wide variety of content in a structured way. After you play a few levels, you quickly can see that teachers played a hand in all aspects of this service. After you log in, and pay the $8/month subscription, you can create individual accounts for up to three children, who can be at different levels. Each child can then log in, and create their own avatar. From this point, they can explore a classroom, where items lead to stories, structured multiple-choice style drills, nursery rhymes and games. There appears to be a lot of content (the press materials say 2,000 activities, with 350 custom lesson plans). We tried one of the younger levels, which included feeding fish by matching upper and lower case letters, coloring in an apple, exploring a farm scene with horse facts, and dragging words into place to complete a sentence. Because the site is designed using Flash, it runs quickly and easily on any current browser, with no need for downloads. The music quality is good. As children play, they collect tickets, which can be used to unlock new clothing or toys for their classroom. This type of reward system has both strengths and weaknesses, but in this case, works well. This type of service is complete enough to supplement an existing school curriculum, or provide the backbone of a home-based curriculum. While some of the activities appear to be leveled incorrectly (we wondered why toddlers were asked to complete sentences), all in all, things line up well, and children always have plenty to do and explore. Prices are $7.95/month and $79.00/year and each account allows up to three children per household. Call about school pricing. The service was created by Age of Learning, Inc. which is located in Glendale, CA. The creators originally started Neopets.com.
$7.95, Internet Site
Teaches: letter recognition, phonics, reading, art, math, science, social studies, music
CTR Rating: 90%