Best online learning platforms for kids (and their parents)

ABC Mouse is a subscription-based, learning-through-play educational platform aimed at children ages 2 to 8. It teaches kids math, science, reading, social studies, and art through 850 different lessons made up of games, puzzles, animations, books, and songs. 
To keep it fun, the platform is laid out a little bit like a kids video game. Kids start by creating their own avatar and their teacher’s avatar. Then they enter their virtual classroom, which is fully interactive, allowing them to choose from over 9,000 different activities, such as reading books, creating art projects, completing puzzles, or singing songs. They can also earn tickets for completing lessons, which is a fun incentivizing tool because those tickets allow them to “buy” virtual items.
Because it is subscription based, parents can rest assured knowing that there are no pop-up ads and no external links to take children off site. There is also a way for parents to track their children’s progress. It also offers the ability to test the platform for free for 30 days so you can make sure it holds your little one’s attention before you buy. 

Created by the same company that made ABCmouse, Adventure Academy keeps the fun going with an immersive, virtual educational world aimed at kids 8 to 13. Kids create their own avatar and in-game home before embarking on a series of games designed to teach them everything from geometry to reading comprehension, science to geography. To keep kids incentivized to move through lessons, players earn coins for everything they complete, which they can then use to dress their avatar or decorate their house. Also, much like a video game, kids can play with their friends in this virtual world but parents can rest easy because they’re doing so in a safe environment.

There’s a reason you’ve heard of Hooked on Phonics: more than 5 million parents and teachers have used this award-winning program, which was developed by education experts. And now, the learn-to-read program is online. 
Early readers can learn to read and write through a series of 20-minute or less sessions that include videos, interactive games, and illustrated stories. With your subscription, you get unlimited access to their “Learn to Read” app, a workbook, 2-3 storybooks, celebration stickers, discussion questions to strengthen reading comprehension, and tips for parents to help extend their kids’ reading. The app can be used offline and on multiple devices, supports multiple users, and gives children achievements as they complete lessons. 

Books — even kid books — can get expensive quickly if you’re buying them often enough, so if you have a voracious reader on your hands, you’ll love ReadingIQ. 
This app is available for tablets, phones, and computers and it offers kids access to over 7,000 books of all different reading levels, from picture books for pre-readers to chapter books and graphic novels for independent readers. It features lots of fun titles by great publishers, including Disney, National Geographic, and Marvel, as well as subject books on math, mythology, history, and science. Award winning books that have won the Caldecott and Newbery Medal are also featured. Early readers can get some guided help when they read too. Best of all, parents can track their children’s reading habits.
ReadingIQ is free for the first 30 days, so you can give it a try and make sure it suits your family.

Making learning fun for kids can be a challenging task, especially when it comes to math. Brought to you by the same company that created Reading Eggs, Mathseeds is a platform for kids ages 3 to 9 that focuses on teaching math, shapes, and time through interactive games. To help gauge your child’s math level, it starts with a short quiz, then places your child in an interactive classroom full of puzzles and games to enhance their core math and problem solving skills. It also includes a parent dashboard so you can track your kid’s progress. One nice additional perk: you can try Mathseeds for 30 days for free before subscribing to make sure it engages your child.

Babbel is an online foreign language platform that will help subscribers learn one of several different languages, including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Norwegian, Indonesian, and Danish. It positions itself as the language learning platform that helps best build your conversational language skills — something that high schoolers might find appealing, especially if they’ve been hit with a serious case of wanderlust.
Babbel is more affordable than many other foreign language learning platforms and often has great deals. (One recently featured three months of free access to K-12 students and college students to help kids use their time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic to learn a new language.) However, while technically suitable for all ages, Babbel will likely be more appealing to older children (middle school-age, high school-age or college) because the emphasis is very much on learning versus. games and younger children are likely to lose interest quickly.

When it comes to passing a high school exam, you don’t need fun learning games. You need real practice exams and that is exactly what Exam Edge does. As a leader in exam prep for a variety of professions, their high school exam prep program offers students practice questions and test prep on 52 different subjects from 15 testing groups so that students walk into their actual exam feeling confident and prepared.