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Millions of children across the country are home from school for several weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak. It can be overwhelming for parents to continue and teachers.

The National Center for Families Learning is offering free, online learning resources.

Parents can work with their children, and older children can learn independently. They also have suggestions for families learning together, creating healthy habits, and helping your child learn to read.

Free, online resources

  • Wonderopolis® invites children to explore intriguing questions about the world around us. The goal is to inspire curiosity that leads to deeper learning. Each “Wonder of the Day®” includes a series of fun and engaging online and offline activities. The 30-minute activities reinforce content learned, while building background knowledge and vocabulary skills. (Available in 60 languages via text and text-to-speech in partnership with Microsoft’s Immersive Reader.)
     
  • Camp Wonderopolis® offers interactive STEM and literacy-building topics boosted by Maker experiments. There are five editions of Camp Wonderopolis available, each with a different theme. Children work their way through seven modules within an edition and earn badges. Camp Wonderopolis teaches vocabulary, background knowledge in science, reading comprehension, critical thinking and other literacy skills.
     
  • 30 Days of Families Learning Together is a guidebook to a month’s worth of family literacy activities designed to inspire family memories rooted in imagining, playing and learning together. (Also available in Spanish)
     
  • Cultivating Readers is a parent magazine that provides effective and easy strategies to promote reading in children’s early years. (Also available in Spanish.)
     
  • Healthy Family Habits offers step-by-step guides for parents to talk about staying healthy and getting moving.

Ages

Elementary school-aged children through early middle school will find these topics interesting. Younger children will need more adult interaction/help, but parents can adapt the content for their preschool aged-kids. 

NCFL works across the U.S. with local partners to bring families and communities together to lift each other up. Making sure parents and teachers have access to free, digital platforms is one way to help our fellow neighbors by keeping kids engaged and learning.