ABCmouse is a site that offers supplemental activities in literacy, math, science, health, social studies, arts, and music. An excellent resource, ABC mouse, is a free subscription for all teachers to use at school and add to the curriculum.
If you are a teacher and you want to give it a try, all you have to do to get started is to sign up for a free subscription, and you will be on your way to fun learning for your students.
To use the site ABC mouse at home, parents can sign up for a 30-day free trial to see if the kids like to use the site. After the free trial, they can decide whether ABC mouse is worth it and sign up for an annual subscription.
What is ABC Mouse?
If you want to know a bit about the company, here is a short overview of how everything started. Launched in November of 2010, ABCmouse: Early Learning Academy was the Age of Learning’s flagship product. It uses the best educational practices in cutting-edge technology and intuitive ingenuity to bring learning to life for kids worldwide.
The Age of Learning Prides itself in educational excellence, highly engaging content, research-validated content, and access for all. Offering three different programs, their most successful program is ABC mouse.
ABCmouse is an award-winning educational program designed for kids ages two years old to eight years old. It is also the most downloadable app for iOS and Android Systems in 2020.
ABC mouse for schools was launched in 2016, with ABC mouse for teachers and homeschoolers becoming available. With over 850 lessons, ABC mouse offers different curriculum choices and is the most comprehensive early learning website known. Sign up for an ABCmouse free trial, and you will not want your kids to play any other games on their computers.
Children learn by exploring their own, working on the ABC mouse learning path, or working through assignments on a custom learning path. ABCmouse is standards-based and research-validated. Linked to Common Core State Standards, ABC mouse has hundreds of hours of content and is consistently updated to add more content.
It is a genuinely high-quality learning online resource that takes safety seriously with no advertising, no popups, and no links to third-party sites.
ABCmouse Content
ABCmouse has different curriculum choices, depending on the age of the child. Over 9000 age-appropriate activities cover reading comprehension, math, science, social studies, art, and more.
All content is accessible on any device with the internet, including laptops, smartphones, and standard tablets. Content is present in animations, educational videos, educational games, and more.
Children get to know familiar characters as they work through the learning plans. They will fall in love with Prospector Paul, King Grammar, ABC mouse, 123 Mouse, and Do-Re-Mi Mouse. When kids learn to read, it begins with uppercase and lowers case recognition, phonics, rhyming words, and word families.
As students transition to first grade, they will learn sentence structure, punctuation, and speech parts. Kids will get a chance to experiment with writing in different genres as well.
Math
In math, children will count and recognize numbers 1-120. They will learn the base-ten system, place value, addition, and subtraction. For the geometry portion, kids will name 2D and 3D shapes and list their attributes. Length, time, patterns, and money are all skills kids will learn with ABC mouse.
Science and Social Studies
Science and Social Studies lessons will have the children engaged. Body & health, plants & animals, weather, climate, seasons, environments, solar system, and matter & its properties are topics ABCmouse covers for PreK-2nd grade.
Kids can also visit the virtual zoo and virtual farm to learn about animals. They can click on the animals in the aquarium and learn about them as well. For social studies topics, the site covers maps and regions of the United States.
Art
ABC mouse also has art lessons. These lessons cover primary and secondary colors and shades of colors. The art activities combine number and letter recognition with paint by numbers and dot-to-dots. There is also a creative outlet with the art section as children can draw and paint in ABC mouse’s unique artist studio.
Children can use lines, shapes, and colors to create individual works of art. To help reinforce color names, children can play games, read stories, paint by numbers, and solve puzzles. These activities will also encourage children to use a variety of colors.
ABC mouse covers all these topics through animations, games, books, songs, puzzles, and printables. When kids use the site, they have access to over 100 books.
These books are both original ABC mouse books and books written by award-winning authors and publishers. Lexile levels and guided reading levels are listed. For nonreaders, ABC mouse offers the “Read to Me” mode in which the student listens to someone reading the book.
The free teacher subscription comes with access to more than 2,000 printables covering math, reading, art, and colors. Kids enjoy earning tickets that allow them to purchase virtual rewards. These rewards are things for their virtual classroom, including pets for the aquarium.
Teacher Account is FREE
A subscription for teachers is free. There is no monthly subscription, no yearly cost. If you teach in a public school, private school, or a headstart, you can access ABCmouse. A subscription for teachers will allow you to customize study plans for your students.
You can assign tasks that correlate to what you are teaching in class. It will also give you access to the printable we mentioned as well as progress tracking. This progress tracking will tell you the total number of learning activities that children have completed in each category.
It offers easy-to-understand graphs that show progress by academic levels and by curriculum subjects.
In 2018, ABC mouse updated the teacher interface to make it more user-friendly. It now allows you to assign assignments based on standards quickly. When you first log in, you have access to plan, teach, or monitor students. Through the teacher account, you can communicate with families and monitor student progress. You can invite parents so parents can see progress and so kids can access assignments at home.
Is ABCmouse Worth It?
Overall, we love ABC mouse. We like the kid-friendly appearance and approach. It is fun, and children enjoy utilizing it. Most of the time, they don’t even realize they are learning. One of the aspects we like the most about ABCmouse is its versatility.
A teacher could use the ABC mouse during a whole group lesson. They could also use it during small group instruction. If you have a student struggling with a concept, you can pull up the lesson in ABCmouse and use it one-on-one.
The versatility of what kids work on is convenient as well. The ability to work on assignments or learning paths or explore on their own will keep their attention.
The lessons on ABCmouse are an excellent supplemental resource that can be used in various modes, including the computer lab, rotating stations (centers), or whole class. However, one downfall of using the site with the entire class is that not all lessons are adequately displayed on an interactive board or through a projector.
We like the delivery of the learning content through a range of presentations. If you have a Spanish-speaking student, ABCmouse offers Spanish language activities and sets the main navigation to Spanish.
We already mentioned the printables, but we love them so much that we thought we would refer them again. These printables are fantastic formative assessments, pencil control practice, and even great for substitute lesson plans. They bridge the online exercise to offscreen activities.
Help Your Students
When the students log on to the virtual classroom, a lot is going on. The virtual classroom can be overwhelming. It would help if you took the time to teach the kids how to navigate the virtual classroom.
Also, students will become easily distracted by all the choices, so you want to keep them on track is essential. Many websites and programs assign learning plans based on student performance; it would be nice if ABCmouse were the same.
Children can access ABCmouse at home once their parents create an account; however, they can only access what the teacher assigns. Students will need a paid subscription if parents want to obtain all of the content.
Conclusion
Our ABCmouse review is overall positive, and it is worth a try. The ABCmouse site is one of the best supplemental resources for teaching kids a strong foundation in academics at school and home.
Kids will learn to read, add, and subtract, and they will have fun doing it. If you teach students ages 8-13, try ABCmouse’s counterpart Adventure Academy. It is very similar to ABCmouse but for older students.
As a new school year begins, step out of your routine, and sign up for a free subscription for up to three children under one account. Then, add ABC mouse to your lesson plans. We know you won’t regret it!
