Creator analyzes kids learning appfrom @nielshoven_

Transcript

Everyone is asking me about Starfall, so let's get into it. Is Starfall education or edutainment? Of worse, it's edutainment. Are you kidding me? Starfall is the equivalent of putting a salad bar in a candy store and trying to convince parents that it's healthy. Look at this. We have nursery rhymes, audiobooks, sing alongs, coloring. You can even put silly hats on a turkey. And yes, I agree there's some good stuff here. This curriculum list is amazing. It's organized by sounds, not letters. They teach the short vowels, the long vowels, the r control vowels, the vowel teams. Do you know how many sounds there are in the English language? It's a lot more than tier. But where are all the other letters? They don't teach the consonants. This is a nice activity for phonemic awareness, helping kids understand how to parse words into letter sounds. And these practice stories are where Starfall better so close to being something really good. They do something kind of neat by replacing complex words with pictures no the beginning readers can still read interesting stories. Personally, I do think it's a mistake to build the bad habit of guessing at words by looking at pictures better I see what they're trying to do. But they still fail because so many of the actual words that they use are still irregular. So the kid doesn't get to practice their phonics anyway, but it does get better, and many of the later stories do have good phonics practice for more advanced readers. No, okay, fine. Keep your good memories of Starfall. It's better than ABC worse. It's way better than Cocomelon, probably worse than Pokemon.