What People Say About Us
I spent ten minutes helping my Kindergarten son get started with Elementary Family Literacy. I checked in with him every-now-and-then, watching what he was doing and answering his questions. After an hour and half, he was still engaged and smiling at his progress. That's the most productive ten minutes I ever spent with him."
Best thing I have bought for my teachers in years. It did exactly what you said and was so easy to implement. My teachers loved it. My special ed kids absolutely went crazy with it.”
Family Literacy Software is being used in the four core areas in middle schools and for targeted instruction in high schools. This summer we also plan to incorporate Family Literacy Software into our summer school remediation program. Students love playing the research-based vocabulary games, and it provides the teachers with a method for consistent and sustained review of both vocabulary words and formatives."
Why Family Learning Software?
According to published research, families who participate in family learning programs experience significant reductions in low academic achievement, teen parenting, joblessness and welfare dependency, going to prison, home and community violence, and more. Those benefits are real, but they have only been available to those who can consistently attend sessions at a center. Now, The Family Learning Company is excited to introduce family learning software to create the same benefits anywhere, anytime.
Family engagement in education requires direct parental (grandparent, aunt, uncle, adult friend, etc.) involvement in the learning process itself. For children to succeed at learning to read, write and think, parents need to provide motivational support for their kids to pay attention to instruction and direct involvement in the practice that children need to master their reading and writing skills. Most children simply do not have the self-motivation to stick with the task in the face of attractive alternatives like TV and video games. When parents get involved, children follow.
Parent participation in the use of family learning software is particularly important during the early childhood years. Not only do children see the importance that their parents place on learning to read and write, most four and five year-olds are simply not ready to manage interactive learning software on their own. While they may be able to watch a video or play a simple game, engaging in an interactive learning experience requires their parent’s (grandparent’s …) involvement through the software.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the research on your product?
There is extensive third-party research on all of the methods used to create Interactive Family Literacy, for example, formative assessment, learner control, vocabulary development, and animations. There is a Research tab on the web site that that provides a one-page white paper on each of the seven methods.
Why aren’t there more animations?
Children and teachers love animations, but the research on the use of animations in learning apps does not support this love. The research is clear: animations not only do not support learning, they actually inhibit learning. This is why Interactive Family Literacy has so few animations ion the learning activities themselves.
How do I Make Assignments?
Teachers can recommend activities, but there are no assignments. Interactive Family Literacy is learner-controlled. The research indicates that learner control is more effective than assignments. The software provides formative assessment data (in the form of yellow and green stars) that students use to inform their learning decisions.
Are we aligned to state standards?
Most states use Common Core Standards and Interactive Family Literacy is aligned to the Common Core Standards for all Grades, K-12. Many states, like California and Arizona, have their “own” standards that are over 99% the same as Common Core Standards, and the software is aligned to them. Texas has its own, unique standards, and the software is aligned to them.
Do You Plan to Build an Assessment?
We plan to build a baseline assessment and an assessment to measure growth. The assessment will have learners play activities so that it will not feel like a test. The assessment will include different activities for children of different ages and for adults. We will provide result to learners (to help them decide where to start) and to schools (to measure growth).
How do we engage parents?
We start by sending them biweekly emails or text messages with concrete suggestions for learning together with their children. We enable them to log in together with their children. They must log ins together with their children for the children to set a learning goal. When they log in together with their children they play many of the activities in multi-player mode.
How Many Languages Do you Support?
There are already four different languages versions of Interactive Family Literacy: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Swahili. Our next languages will be Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Mandarin. Because our technology platform makes creating language versions easy, we can create additional languages for school districts is they order a sufficient number of software licenses.
What Grades at the different levels?
For most of the student modules, there are four levels for each grade: Early Literacy (Grades PreK-K), elementary Literacy (Grades K-3), Upper elementary STEM (Grades 4-6), and Middle School (Grades 6-8). For High School, there are three levels per grade (Grades 9-12). For Adult Literacy, there are two levels per adult reading grade (Grades 1-8).
How do we deliver?
Most students and their families access the online version of Interactive Family Literacy. But many families do not have tablets or laptops at home and use their phones to access the Internet; this is not sufficient “access” for families to acquire literacy skills. For these families, we preload all 10,700 activities on inexpensive Android tablets that require no Internet access.
Family Learning Software Features
- Activities for Children & Adults
- Available in English & Español
- Parent Tips Videos Included
- Shared Learning Builds Stronger Families
- Perpetual License