As an early years teacher, I know how important it is to read to our children everyday. It’s a wonderful way to build early literacy skills, develop oral language skills, promote brain development and support our little learners to develop a passion for reading which will carry them through childhood and beyond!
I’m always on the look out for ways to foster a lifelong love of reading with my own little learners and those that were in my classroom as a teacher. Recently, I discovered a company that has developed a kid-safe streaming service FULL of animated storybooks. If you haven’t heard of Vooks, I’m going to introduce you to them right now!
Before I begin, I wanted to openly share that Vooks have gifted me an annual subscription to their streaming services for the purposes of this blog post. While this is a sponsored blog, I only recommend products and services that I love and use with my own little learners!
So what are Vooks? Well they’re an upcoming digital platform which transforms popular picture books into animated stories! There’s a growing library of children’s books on the app and as of today, some of our personal favourites include:
- Giraffe’s Can’t Dance (my favourite)
- They all saw a Cat (Lilly’s favourite)
- Click, Clack, Moo – Cows that Type
- Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
- But First, We Nap (Elliot’s favourite)
- Harry the Dirty Dog
Each of the books feature slow-paced animations and read-along-text. This means our little learners are developing early concepts of print as they follow along! Even if your little learners can’t read independently yet, they can still be exposed to text as they enjoy their favourite stories.
The read aloud nature of the animated stories featured on Vooks also promote and model reading strategies and build oral language skills. There have been countless studies conducted over the years showing that children that read everyday are much more likely to have reading success than those that are not exposed to stories every single day. Read alouds expose children to texts that they aren’t yet capable of reading independently which is also a wonderful way to expose our little learners to language patterns and vocabulary words that they may not experience in their day to day lives.
When you create a subscription with Vooks and install their app to your device, you’re taken to a menu where you can browse lots of different titles and categories such as kindness, friendship, animals and even browse books by age. There’s also an option to sync titles to your device so that you can access them on the go. This is perfect for classroom use or even when you’re travelling with little ones because you don’t need access to the internet to watch your favourite stories!
As well as getting a whole year of Vooks for free, as a teacher and homeschooler, you can also access a growing library of resources such as teacher guides and activity ideas to use alongside several of the animated books available for viewing on the Vooks app! These teacher guides provide activity ideas with matching black line masters which can be used to complement the stories you read with your little learners.
We have really enjoyed using Vooks at home and many of my teacher friends have been using Vooks in their classrooms too! They are perfect for winding down after lunch breaks and for quiet time at home. We don’t use devices with our children often but when we do, it’s so nice to have quality apps and resources to use with them!
