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HOMER: Fun Learning for Kids

Early learners explore fun activities to gain literacy skills and more

Learning rating

Community rating

Based on 5 reviews

Privacy rating

Expert evaluation by Common Sense

Grades

Pre-K–2

Subjects & Skills

Creativity, Critical Thinking, English Language Arts, English-Language Learning, Math

Price: Free to try
Platforms: Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire

Pros: Personalized learn-to-read lessons are thorough and entertaining. Additional activities cover a wide range of topics.

Cons: Emphasis mainly on alphabet and phonics with little attention to comprehension.

Bottom Line: Top-notch phonics program effectively coaches students, but lacks some standard features useful for the classroom.

HOMER: Fun Learning for Kids can be an excellent self-guided phonics experience for kids, with a wide range of prereading and early-reading skill levels. For students needing practice in phonics, turn to the Reading section, which offers a scaffolded lesson path that includes interactive practice and voice recordings. To encourage reading, check out Stories, which offers beautifully illustrated tales from different genres. The read-aloud stories would work great for individuals or for a large group, since topics range from history to science. Since kids follow an individualized path, differentiation is baked right in.

Enrichment activities continue with the Math, Games, Songs, and Practice sections, which introduce early math topics and develop memory, matching, and sequencing skills. Each section asks kids to interact by speaking, drawing, or responding to questions, which facilitates building out to off-screen activities.

HOMER: Fun Learning for Kids doesn't offer teachers much help in tracking student progress or providing feedback on learning. A bare-bones Insights section offers basic data on which activities each user profile played and how much time they spent doing so. The app also provides free printables when you sign up for text messages.

HOMER: Fun Learning for Kids is an early learning app for kids age 2 to 8 that focuses on literacy with drawing, voice recording, stories, and songs, along with more traditional phonics lessons. A colorful main screen presents all of the options kids can explore: Math, Stories, Games, Reading, Songs, Creativity, and Practice and other seasonal topics. Clear verbal instructions guide kids in all areas. 

In the Reading section, kids follow a personalized, adaptive learning path as they tap and listen to a lesson, play activities, and review before moving on to the next lesson. In Math and Games, kids choose from a large menu of activities that touch on numbers, short-term memory, puzzles, and logic. Stories and Songs have books, nursery rhymes, and song videos in a variety of genres and combine original content with well-known classics. Kids can draw or use stickers to create a variety of themed scenes in the Creativity section.

HOMER: Fun Learning for Kids is an outstanding way to get students excited about reading. The systematic phonics lessons can help kids learn letter sounds, capitalization, word recognition, and a bit of reading comprehension. By reading or listening to the stories, kids can also learn about animals, historic figures, world cultures, music, and more. As kids make voice recordings and draw pictures, they are learning digital creation skills while applying their knowledge.

The app includes plenty of positive feedback ("Hooray and happy day!" and "Wiggly ears cheers!"), but it can feel a bit over-the-top after a while. Despite this, the inclusion of SEL content is especially great to have, and the developers have clearly been investing in beefing up the non-literacy-related content. Though the math and SEL programs are greatly improved, HOMER: Fun Learning for Kids' strength is still in its reading instruction. And sometimes, with the additional content, it can feel that the app lacks focus. That said, the upside is that even kids who aren't quite ready to read can easily find something to do. In fact, with so much content, kids will have solid content to read, listen to, and explore for months.

Learning Rating

Overall Rating
Engagement

A colorful menu hosts many quality lessons, books, songs, and interactive games. Content covers a variety of high-interest topics sure to capture kids' attention.

Pedagogy

Personalized phonics lessons and rich stories strategically guide students through early reading activities. Kids are also free to choose between puzzles, games, songs, and more.

Support

There are clear verbal instructions but little help when kids struggle to respond correctly -- it's all  English-only. Additional parent/teacher support is available on the developer's website.

Community Rating

This an extremely great app. If you are looking for an app that will allow your child/student to learn and interact at the same time, this is the perfect app for you and them! Easy to use.

This is a great teaching tool, I loved every part of this app and I believe that all students can benefit from it, no matter how ahead or behind they may be in their studies, learning is ongoing.

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Privacy Rating

Data Safety How safe is this product?

  • Users can interact with trusted users.
  • Personal information can be displayed publicly.
  • Unclear whether user-created content is filtered for personal information before being made publicly visible.

Data Rights What rights do I have to the data?

  • Users can create or upload content.
  • Processes to access or review user data are available.
  • Processes to modify data are available for authorized users.

Ads & Tracking Are there advertisements or tracking?

  • Personal information is not shared for third-party marketing.
  • Traditional or contextual advertisements are displayed.
  • Personalised advertising is not displayed.

Continue reading about this tool's privacy practices, including data collection, sharing, and security.

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