By Kristina Massari
Supporting public libraries’ life-long learning initiatives, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, is pleased to announce Miss Humblebee’s Academy, a new early literacy product that will assist the library’s youngest learners in building foundational literacy skills. Partnering with Miss Humblebee LLC., Gale has co-developed a robust product tailored specifically to the public library user, which includes the assessment tools libraries need to measure their impact on early literacy development in their communities.Studies show that participating in quality early learning can boost children’s educational attainment and earnings later in life, underscoring the importance for public libraries to provide resources that serve this young audience.
“Libraries are evolving into institutions of learning and service that have a direct impact on the lives of community members,” said Paul Gazzolo, senior vice president and general manager, Gale. “By offering a product like Miss Humblebee’s Academy, libraries will play a pivotal role in helping children establish strong literacy skills and preparing them for kindergarten and beyond.”
Designed for children ages 3 to 6, Miss Humblebee’s Academy is an easy-to-use, interactive and award-winning online and mobile-accessible kindergarten-readiness solution. It offers hundreds of lessons spanning all major academic subjects, weekly progress reports, and is the only product that provides assessments to measure proficiency and learning outcomes.
Miss Humblebee’s Academy provides children an opportunity to learn while having fun in a safe online classroom environment with no pop-ups, ads or links to other websites; and provides parents with tools to measure their child’s kindergarten-readiness while working at the library, at home or on the go. The product assesses cognitive skills at regular intervals for measurable improvement toward kindergarten-readiness and offers a developmental observation checklist allowing parents to review and record social and emotional growth as an additional condition of school preparedness. Weekly emails alert parents to review curriculum progress and assessment results that are available online 24/7. A portion of the curriculum is also available offline in the form of printables and worksheets.