Idea Academy · The School

The Learning Wing

Letters, sounds and words, one small step at a time.

For parents and educators

Free phonics lessons for young readers

The Learning Wing is the skills side of Idea Academy, the School in United By Creativity’s City of Creativity. Lower Elementary rooms (Pre-K to 2nd grade) teach alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, phonics and heart words. Upper Elementary rooms (3rd to 5th grade) will teach longer words, spelling patterns, fluency and comprehension.

How each lesson works

I do: Ms. Green models the new sound and shows two letters joining to make it.
We do: your child listens to a word and taps the one they hear.
You do: your child builds words in sound boxes. A digraph like sh is one sound, so it fills one box.
Read it: a three-page decodable book that only uses sounds already taught. Heart words (like the and is) are marked with a heart.

Gentle by design

There are no timers, scores or rankings, and your child’s voice is never recorded or graded. Directions can be heard again at any time. Free Play lets children build any word and reread any book. Progress saves on this device only, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Lessons follow a common phonics order (short vowels, then digraphs, then blends) and support the reading foundational skills in the Missouri Learning Standards for kindergarten through 2nd grade.