When children engage with the same concept in different ways, it strengthens their understanding of the topic. But as educators and caregivers, it can be difficult to find a range of high-quality content to share with your little learners. The good news is that both Education.com and IXL have extensive libraries of resources and skills that you can depend on for PK-5 and beyond.
Whether you’re a parent or a teacher, you can use these two complementary resources to create a learning routine that really sticks. Here’s how:
1. Select a topic
The first step is deciding what you want your learners to work on. If you already have a topic in mind, great!
If not, try to think of areas that you want your learners to explore further. Maybe it’s a topic that you’ve noticed misunderstandings in, or feel you haven’t covered thoroughly yet. Or maybe you’ve seen a student demonstrating strength, and want to push them to go even further.
And don’t be afraid to simply choose topics that align with learners’ interests—learning should be fun, after all!
In this example, we’d like our students to learn more about plants.
2. Select a resource from Education.com’s Learning Library
Education.com has over 34,000 resources to choose from! Visit the Learning Library and use the search bar at the top of the page to find your topic. You can filter results by your learners’ grade level, subjects you’re interested in, type of resource, and more in the bars along the top and left-hand side of the page.
Look through the resources on your topic, and select the one that seems most relevant to your lesson as well as most engaging for your learners. For example, our search for plants provided over 600 resources including activities, worksheets, and lesson plans. By filtering to show first grade science resources, and sorting by relevance, we narrowed down the search until we selected the Parts of a Plant workbook.
3. Suggest a skill from IXL’s curriculum
Next, you can reinforce their learning with a complementary skill from IXL! By engaging with the same material in a whole new way, learners will gain a different perspective on what they’ve learned, and strengthen their understanding.
Visit IXL.com and type your topic into the search bar at the top of the page. For example, we searched for “parts of a plant” and selected the second-grade skill Identify plant parts and their functions.
Once you’ve selected your skill, have students answer 10 questions, and carefully review the explanations for each answer they miss together. This helps children actively learn from their mistakes, and make lasting progress!
If you have an IXL membership, your learners will be able to answer unlimited questions in more than 8,000 skills, and you’ll receive full analytics reports on their progress. This will help you in selecting new topics that your child or students should work on in the future.
4. Reflect on the topic
Now, take some time to talk about the topic together. Using our example, here are some good questions to start with:
- If you had to explain the different parts of a plant to a younger sibling, what would you say?
- What’s one thing you discovered about plants that was surprising?
- Which part of the plant are you curious about, and interested in learning more?
Reflecting on what they’ve learned will help students solidify their knowledge. Plus, it will give you a good sense of how well they understand the topic!
5. Celebrate with play time
After completing activities and reflecting on them, it’s time for a brain break! Spending time outside or completing an arts and crafts project are great rewards for hard work.
By combining IXL and Education.com, you can ensure that students learn all the important skills they need. Education.com is full of hands-on activities and resources that learners can use to explore new topics. Then, they can continue the learning and check their knowledge on IXL. This creates a well-rounded learning routine that’s easy for educators, and perfect for young learners!
