Standards alignment

(upbeat piano music) Khan Academy Kids is an educational program for ages two through seven that's designed to inspire a lifetime of learning and discovery. Khan Kids includes thousands of activities, lessons and books that cover preschool through grade one English language, arts and math Common Core standards and social-emotional development. As we design these interactive experiences, we're constantly asking ourselves, how might we use technology to enhance the learning for young children beyond what they would otherwise experience? So today, I wanted to highlight a few examples of standards that we cover in our program and show how they're typically taught in the classroom with offline methods, and how we use technology to extend the learning of these concepts. Our first examples around adding and subtracting within 20 and relating counting to addition and subtraction. For example, counting on two to add two. One tool used is a number line. Students need to understand the starting point, the number of spaces to move, and which direction to move. We created an interactive number line. We show kids how to find the starting point then count on or subtract from that point by moving Peck the bird. We graphically show the number of spots moved and the end. We also cover standards around learning to tell time. There are various tools for kids to learn how to tell time, they learn about the hour hand and the minute hand and they have to count by fives to count the minutes. It's often hard to connect the relationship between the analog and digital clock. With our clock activity in Khan Kids, our goal was to make this relationship clear. There's an open ended exploratory mode where you can move the hands of the clock and see how the digital clock changes. In addition to math, we cover reading standards like orally producing single syllable words by blending sounds which are called phonemes. To read words kids need to understand several things. First, they need to know the individual letter sounds and they need to understand how the individual sounds blend from left to right to form a word. teachers often use a tool called Elkonin boxes like the boxes on the right here to break down the individual phonemes. With technology we can use real time visual and audio feedback in our tool to help children understand the letter sounds and how they blend together even when they don't blend them correctly. - Spell the word "duck" (sounds out word) Oops, this spells "ckud". Try again. Spell the word "duck". (sounds out word) Good job. You spell duck. That's the word "duck." - This next example is a language standard around frequently occurring adjectives and distinguishing the shades of meaning among different adjectives. Offline activities can include worksheets to describe objects like a monster or fill in the blanks in a sentence. We wanted something that would bring to light the definitions and expand kids' understanding of the definitions of what is an adjective. We created a monster maker where you can swap out different adjectives and concretely see how the monster changes. - Make a monster, put a green adjective on the green line, put a pink adjective on the pink line. Green. Striped. [Monster] - (giggles) - Red. Blue. - Square. - Yeah! - Round. Awesome! The monster is blue, and round. - Our final example is around social-emotional learning. Recognizing basic social problems in books or pictures and learning how to resolve conflicts. There's really no substitution for the rich interactions and conversations between peers and with adults that happen on the playground and in the classroom. In fact, we're inherently a bit limited with technology and don't intend to replace those real world experiences. We've worked with educators from the lab preschool at Stanford to understand common social interactions and interest issues that arise. And we weave these themes about friendships, patience, and persistence and facing fears into our original stories and books. We have a story about a mouse who feels left out when his friend Scorpion makes a new friend. So hopefully that gives you an idea of how we think about harnessing the power of technology to extend learning experiences for young children. If you'd like to try some of these activities, you can find Khan Academy Kids on the app stores. Thanks.