Early language learning has enormous benefits for children's development and future, yet there are hundreds of millions of children who still lack the opportunity to learn languages due to availability or cost. Our mission is to change this.
Moomin Language School uses digital tools and learning organizations' own teachers to make the service easily adoptable and cost-effective. Children use the learning application individually for 5-15 minutes every weekday to learn vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation through an interesting storyline and various game-like exercises. Moomin Language School provides an American English native speaker model, and children can practice their pronunciation in the learning application's language lab every day. Children's language skills are tested monthly in game-like tests, and teachers and parents can follow the children's progress in real-time progress reports online.
Once a week children have a playful session with their teacher/educator and other children on a topic which they have learned with the learning application. In these playful sessions children use the new language to communicate and play with each other and to deepen and reinforce what they have learned with the learning application. Children use no digital tools during the playful sessions; instead, the lessons consist of physical activities, drama, songs, stories and arts and crafts. The session plans include plenty of audio files as well as tips and suggestions to help teachers and educators use Finnish education methods in their own teaching.
Just like Finnish education in general, Moomin Language School aims to teach children all the skills they will need. That is why in addition to a foreign language, Moomin Language School teaches children essential future skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking and innovation. These skills are practiced alongside language skills on a daily basis in the learning application and the playful sessions.
Moomin Language School has been created by an interdisciplinary team of language teachers, early childhood educators, linguists, experts of state-of-the-art technology and Finnish education specialists, and all the decisions regarding the service are based on research into child development and early language learning. The team partners with universities and other organizations to research the service, and they already have proven results of the service's effectiveness; for example in a study done in Malaysia, first-graders using Moomin Language School got on average 18% better results than a reference group that used book material.
