Science has helped us understand much of why certain things happen in this universe. Reading textbooks and blogs (like this one) introduce curious minds to the very foundations of science. However, this is theoretical in nature and requires a comprehensive understanding of scientific terms and jargon before our kids are ready to tackle practical problems.

The core aim of a teacher is to teach their students about the key concepts of a subject in order for the children to retain the facts and build on them leading up to assessments. This must be done in a fun and engaging way that will significantly increase the potential for children to easily remember information and for them to have an awesome time in the process.

Enter Building Blocks of Science 3D. This is a three-dimensional science kit that enables children to explore the multiple facets of science.

Key Features:

• Captivating and engaging investigations within 30 minutes – effective time management
• Each investigation integrates the 3 dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) – Crosscutting Concepts, Science and Engineering Practices and Disciplinary Core Ideas (more on this below)
• Flexible instruction
• Best quality science materials tested for rigorous performance and durability
• Digital tools enhance and differentiate the learning of students – information is provided in different forms for consumption according to learning styles
• Superior teacher support for effective lesson planning
• Pay as you go pricing – no yearly subscription or licensing fees

Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)

These rigorous educational standards form the basis of the Building Blocks of Science toolkit.

Crosscutting Concepts

These intersecting concepts enable students to explore connections across the 4 domains of science: Physical Science; Life Science; Earth and Space Science; and Engineering Design. A concept, like cause and effect, is explicitly demonstrated and helps students to develop a coherent and scientifically grounded view of the world around them.

Science and Engineering Practices

These practices describe the process behind the investigation of the natural world conducted by scientists as well as the design process and building of systems by engineers. It also explains and extends the concept of inquiry in science through the range of cognitive, social and physical practices.

Disciplinary Core Ideas

These key ideas have broad importance within or across multiple science or engineering disciplines. They also build on each other as students progress through their respective grades.

Why Should I Choose Building Blocks of Science?

This toolkit is designed to throw its full weight behind both instructors and students. No matter where you are or what your environment is, these 3D kits guarantee peace of mind and delivers authentic lab experiments in an ever-changing learning environment.

Instructional consistency from student to student is also a key benefit when these kits are deployed. Kids investigating the latest and greatest science concepts at home will be learning the same concepts and information as a student in an in-class setting.

After the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the world in 2020, education had to be dramatically rethought. Certain activities had to be completed outside of virtual classes at home (asynchronous learning) while simple activities like writing on a whiteboard were easily replaced with technology alternatives and could be delivered real time during a class (synchronous learning). These toolkits can accommodate both guided learning (online and in-person) and self-paced learning where curiosity and determination play a huge part.

Lastly, these toolkits provide a consistent and unique lab experience for each student. This ensures that each student is guided by a core framework established by the teacher but retains the independence to explore these concepts on their own

Wrapping it up, if you take a step back and view the entire theoretical and practical foundation of the Building Blocks of Science 3D, you will realize that it positions itself to deliver scientific knowledge of the highest quality by integrating with robust frameworks and activities and providing fantastic teacher resources and engaging material for students. We hope that you will consider this tool in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Thanks! 

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Technology is playing a key role in every aspect of our lives today. The same applies to the educative space. In recent times, schools are levelling-up to match the competencies of the ‘corporate world’ by introducing new & improved ‘digital solutions’ for data management and learning.

There is no doubt about the fact that ‘digital software’ is creating better learning environments for students by complimenting the teaching efforts of the educators. An e-classroom is well-equipped to answer every question that the inquisitive learners wish to know about.

Many schools are looking for solutions that are not only limited to the learning aspect, but also cover the entire gamut of responsibilities that schools have at hand. To address this growing need, The Knowledge Hub has introduced the NextLearingPlatform with an aim to positively transform the dimensions of the K-12 ecosystem.

What exactly is the NextLearingPlatform?

NextLearingPlatform is a powerful combination of school management system, course management system, adaptive learning technology and award-winning content system, that takes care of all academic and administrative needs of the school. In simple words, it is everything and beyond, that a school requires to function seamlessly.

A brief on each of the ‘four’ core areas of focus:

ERP: The routine administrative work like attendance, staff payroll, managing timetables, and scheduling fees can be automated with the use of this ERP platform. Important student records and admission documents can be retrieved from the system at the click of a button, thus going paperless and reducing the burden of having to carefully store physical files. This enables administrators to focus on the smooth functioning of the school while demonstrating efficiency, cost-saving, and ingenuity.

Learning Management System: The entire annual course plan for various subjects and extra-curricular activities is easily incorporated via this tool. Predefining the teaching plan well in advance helps the educators focus on innovative classroom delivery, rather than spending time on planning what lesson to teach next, a day before its delivery. Even students have an easy access to the learning aids taught in class on their phones or tabs, while they are at home. Being an interactive platform, students can get their queries addressed anytime and from anywhere.

Next Review: To test the student’s critical thinking abilities, the tool has an in-built customizable ‘assessment’ process in place. Educators can upload a bank of open-ended and multiple-choice questions to evaluate the child’s knowledge about the topic taught in school. To further automate the process, the ERP system allows teachers to feed in a one-time grading system, on basis of which an auto-computed score is shared with the child at the end of the assignment. The grading helps the students to be aware of their strengths & weaknesses, and focus on continuous improvement.

Next Education Courseware: To support the teacher in generating learning aids and innovative teaching concepts, the tool makes available a bank of ‘content’ that is created by professional ‘academic curriculum planners’. The fact that it is already being used by over 12,000+ schools, is a testament to the credibility of the Award-Winning content strategy provided by this platform.

What value does the NextlearningPlatform provide to different stakeholders?

All the major stakeholders of the K-12 school directly or indirectly benefit and are linked seamlessly by this AI multi-dimensional platform.

Teachers:

Allows educators to schedule and conduct ‘Live lectures’ remotely. Especially in the current scenario, where the world has to maintain ‘physical distance’, the Next Learning Platform provides an excellent solution to create a classroom-like ‘learning experience’ at home. Also, the automated lesson-planning comes handy and reduces the burden of teachers to prepare lengthy ‘teaching materials’ for children. By clicking on the appropriate class, teachers get an overview of the cumulative performance record and individualized score of each child in a real-time.

Principal:

The head Principal of the school gets a bird’s eye view of progress of students and the effectiveness of curriculum delivery by teachers, simply by logging into the portal from their handheld devices.

Students:

The pace of learning for every child could be different. Through the Next Learning Platform, it is easier for students to learn at their own speed, as they have full access to digital content and recorded classroom sessions undertaken by the subject-specific teacher. Students can even get their queries clarified and upload their projects & assignments digitally.

Parents:   

To ease the tension of a worrisome parent, the ERP solution integrates a real-time instant notification service, where parents get an email or SMS as soon as the child has been assigned with any homework. Parents can even access the progress report of the child and communicate freely with teachers & admin staff without having to take leave from work to attend a meeting in school.

Schools that have welcomed innovation by integrating the Next Learning Platform already have an edge over the other institutions and are witnessing immense benefits by eliminating human error and improving efficiencies.

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If you’ve noticed your child often make an excuse when you try to get him to read a book, then it’s time to make some amendments in the reading experience provided to the child. We understand how tiresome it could be for parents to approach their tiny-ones with a book without having to play a game of catch-and-cook with them around the house. Well as you sigh, we have some good news to share.

‘Highlights’ is everyone’s favorite ‘reading platform’ and has been endorsed by parents and teachers, from across the globe. Being a new-age reading platform, Highlights aim is to motivate every child to not only be a voracious reader, but also be a champ at developing good writing skills and learn to communicate effectively.

Highlights delightfully launched its Readers+ kit which entails 500 choicest stories that include fiction and non-fiction reading material across 10 differentiated content areas & reading levels, through its app. This makes it easier for parents and teachers to choose a ‘topic’ for their child’s next reading schedule. Having a consolidated platform saves time on having to do research and going from one bookstore to the other, to hunt for story books. The portal is also thoughtfully designed to enable the child to himself browse through the books and various activities and follow the self-explanatory instructions that guide him to navigate seamlessly on the portal.

Wondering how easy it is to access the Readers+ Kit?

Children simply need to open the App and click the ‘green icon’ on the Readers+ kit homepage to access their favorite book title. After the book has been read, children even get to follow-up their reading by participating in ‘fun activities’ and earn rewards for completing various tasks. This helps the child to recollect the story and tests his retention power. It also boosts the child’s morale and motivates him to read with clarity, rather than browsing through the pages.

Learning to Speak English with correct pronunciation can be rewarding too!

Children mimic songs, conversations & stories uttered by adults and hence teachers & parents need to make it a mindful practice to always choose the right words & use correct pronunciation around their children. It is however not feasible for the child to be around an elder all through the day, and that’s where the Readers+ kit comes handy.

The ‘speaking activity’ is specifically designed to assist our little champs to improve their verbal fluency by practicing speaking English sentences correctly. Five featured sentences from every story are pre-recorded and the child needs to listen to each one of them attentively. It is then the child’s turn to repeat the sentence with the same finesse as he just heard in the recording. The app immediately checks the correctness of the speech and rates the speaking fluency of the child. This motivates the child to continue improving his score gradually by repeating every word in the sentence correctly. In this manner, the elementary school goer develops immense confidence and demonstrates proactiveness the next time he is asked to participate in a group discussion at school.

Effective listening is the key to proper communication & writing

After having read and repeated the sentence verbally, the Readers+ app takes the activity level a notch higher. The child is asked to concentrate on the sentence from the story that is read aloud to him and then he has to proceed towards arranging the words of the phrase that are presented to him in a jumbled manner. This exercise requires the child to first listen attentively, then understand what each word in the sentence stands for, and then arrange the words correctly to form a sentence. At the end of the session, triumphant efforts of the child are rewarded with a star badge added to their profiles.

Inculcating critical thinking at an early age

To complete the learning experience and unlock the true potential of the children, a set of questions are asked at the end of the story to test the child’s comprehensive capabilities. The child is given the opportunity to pen down his understanding in 50 to 100 characters. This concluding exercise is an excellent medium to test the child’s grammar, sentence formation skills, and usage of spellings.

If you haven’t already subscribed to the Highlights app, it’s time to get started. With so many power-packed features, we are sure your geniuses will gain even more confidence through their journey of becoming voracious readers, writers, and effective communicators.

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Think of Amazon and their Kindle books. Their platform and ease of buying and reading books have taken the reading industry by storm. Kutubee, which is an interactive reading platform for kids, functions pretty much the same way. But in this particular software, books are pre-loaded onto a digital reading platform that is easily accessible and packs a lot of features in order to keep the process simple for both teachers and children.

About Kutubee and Its Features

Kutubee provides a very unique reading experience for our children to read and engage with over 1500+ illustrated stories in English, Arabic and French that are carefully hand-picked by experts.

Some key features:

• Increase knowledge – a variety of stories at different reading levels for all kinds of interests
• Stimulate creative thinking where the students can analyze the content of the story by utilizing tools such as highlighting to see the bigger picture
• Customize avatars of each student to personalize their learning space and journey
• Able to listen to stories and you can follow along as the words being read are highlighted
• Books are classified according to:

1. IB Primary Years Program (PYP)
2. Level Reading (example Level 1 and 2)
3. Subject
4. Age

• A variety of sound effects are present in the reading of the book
• Users are able to record and save their voice so that students can present their readings to teachers, and teachers can also model how a certain story is read
• Offline reading is available for maximum exposure when students are on the go
• A few questions are asked at the end of each story to keep the students engaged and test their comprehension in the process
• Teachers have a comprehensive portal that allows them to track student and class progress
• Teachers can also generate detailed Excel reports that highlight class statistics and metrics
• Teachers can curate and build their own collections of frequently used books and set reading assignments for their students
• A significant number of teacher resources have been compiled by Kutubee to aid teachers with the initial adoption of this application

Feature Highlight: Read to Me

It enables the child to listen to the recorded stories anywhere and without an internet connection on all smart devices. In addition, it includes a lot of sound effects. Children can easily browse through the categorized books and enjoy reading at school and on their own time. In addition, children, parents, and teachers can enrich the content of the stories within Kutubee by recording their own readings or creating and adding a new dialog. It will facilitate the interaction between educators and parents by means of keeping you updated on and engaged in the reading development of the children.

Conclusion

In its essence, Kutubee is a very versatile tool that packages key features, both for educators and children, in order to deliver quality reading material and comprehension of stories.

It allows for an entire class or grade level to simultaneously start on a curated list of books set by the teacher, but it also gives individual students space to explore and progress on their reading at a pace that is comfortable for them to bear.

Teachers also have the ability to view class-wide and grade-wide statistics on how many books are being read and how many hours are being spent reading. They can also assign reading assignments and monitor individual students by requesting the student to record a reading session.

This combined feature set allows for gentle guidance and independence of learners, boosting their confidence in reading.

Check out Kutubee now!

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The 3Rs of education start with reading, writing, and then move on to arithmetic. Reading is the first ‘R’ taught to the child in school and for that matter, it is the most basic fundamental skill that the child needs to learn in order to succeed in life. A good habit like ‘reading’ when cultivated at an early age can spark an interest in the child and stays with the child even when he is grown into a teenager and an adult. The idea is to make the child comfortable with reading a book, whether it is a story or a workbook from school.

Make books your child’s best friend! Though reading is a simple activity, there are numerous benefits attributed to it. Besides being a fun thing to do, reading sharpens the mind, improves concentration, and even enhances interpersonal skills. Through reading, an elementary school goer is exposed to different kinds of information, stories, and ideas that influence their thoughts and feelings. A young reader develops favorable qualities like empathy, confidence, and a strong belief system based on high morals & values. The benefits of reading are limitless and through this blog, we aim to highlight a few of them:

Increased Attention Span

In today’s world of increasing social media usage and digital entertainment, the attention span of the child is getting shorter. It is really a mammoth task for parents to get their 6-year-old children to sit in one place and focus on a task. Slowly introducing your energetic bundle of joy to the world of reading allows him to ‘stay put’ for a longer duration. Hence, a simple practice of dedicating 20-minutes of ‘reading time’ daily goes a long way.

Improved Imagination

Reading to your children, and later encouraging them to read on their own, helps to stimulate the imagination in a powerful way. It is the innate nature of the child to be curious, however, a good book further enhances ‘curiosity’ and encourages the child to ask relevant questions to adults. While asking questions, the child engages in verbal interaction, which helps him use vocabulary to communicate what he is thinking and feeling while trying to discover a new concept.

Fostering Creativity

Vivid characters and attractive imagery in the book broadens the scope for creative thinking amongst children. They jump right onboard the fantasy wagon which transports their imagination into an exciting sojourn where even the sky is not a limit. Children who are creatively inclined do not hesitate to try out new ideas, and are more likely to be better at problem-solving

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