Skatekids cultivates early readers by engaging them in educational activities scientifically designed to stimulate the development of cognitive processes that are necessary in learning to read. Skatekids provides multiple reading levels and presents various formats for practice and skill development, effectively creating critical thinkers and teaching children how to learn. All of these activities take place within a safe and age-appropriate online world designed specifically for these young "digital natives".

Skatekids takes learners from early literacy levels to word reading and comprehension; they acquire skills in a developmentally appropriate sequence, moving to higher levels only after prerequisite skills are mastered. The scientifically-designed and clinically-proven activities help students develop a true mastery of skills that can be applied and transferred to other academic areas.

Skatekids - Skills

To learn about all the skills Skatekids helps develop, click on this quick overview.

Skatekids - Games

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Beach Builder develops oral comprehension, reading comprehension, fluency, spatial and proximity relationships, vocabulary, and the ability to mentally create visual scenes. At the beginning of each round, students listen to a short passage with which they can read along. When the student feels ready, they recreate the scene from that passage by using drag-and-drop objects on their screen - with no option of referring back to the passage. Through simultaneous processing and verbal rehearsal/internalized speech, students develop strategies to filter irrelevant and redundant information, make inferences, and chunk or reduce the information from which they'll recreate the scene. These processes further develop the student's visualization skills and planning strategies.
Board Tech helps students develop verbal rehearsal strategies, learn to reduce information, identify patterns, visualize, incorporate visual scanning, and develop new strategies. In this activity, students study an abstract pattern of decals on a snowboard for ten seconds after which they must then reproduce that arrangement on a blank snowboard without any visual reference to the original pattern. To perform this activity successfully, students must use planning skills to recode the visual pattern; they must also adopt simultaneous processing strategies in order to understand and retain the relationships among the items long enough to recreate the pattern.
Gallop Park develops reading comprehension, fluency and vocabulary. Through the use of simultaneous processing and verbal rehearsal/internalized speech, students practice chunking and reducing information, as well as planning and visualizing information. At the beginning of each round, students read a passage and then recreate the scene without referring back to the passage. Through simultaneous processing and verbal rehearsal/internalized speech, students develop strategies to filter irrelevant and redundant information, make inferences, and reduce/chunk information. Using these strategies helps students recall the information needed to accurately recreate the scene; the processes involved in creating those strategies aids in the development of students' overall visualization skills and planning strategies.
Kayak Attack builds working memory, sequencing, visual scanning, planning, the use of speech as a rehearsal strategy, pattern recognition, and chunking/reducing information. At the beginning of each round, students hear the names of various objects that they must later collect in a specific order. During this activity, students also develop motor skills as they use the arrow keys to steer their kayak through treacherous waters.
Kickflip Fury develops verbal rehearsal/internalized speech and working memory. In this activity, several objects are presented to students in a specific order; they must then collect those objects, in that same order, while using their mouse to guide a skateboarder through a busy city scene.
In Skate Create, students practice chunking and reducing information, acquire awareness of spatial orientation, and learn to recode visual information. This activity requires students to reproduce an abstract design on a skateboard after studying that design for ten seconds. Students must recode the pattern in order to accurately recreate it, and they develop simultaneous processing strategies in order to remember the relationships among the items; practicing these skills and strategies leads to improved reading comprehension. Later levels increase the cognitive demands by incorporating more complex designs and adding new features that need to be remembered.
Skidmarks, P.I. develops cognitive planning, working memory, visual scanning, verbal rehearsal/internalized speech, and reading comprehension. Working with Private Investigator Archibald 'Skid' Marks, students are enlisted to help solve various mysteries across SKO City. They are given sets of instructions to collect and deliver certain items; they must then navigate their car throughout the crowded city in order to collect and deliver those items according to the plan.
The activities in Snowboard Blast develop phonemic awareness, phonics, working memory, spelling, word decoding skills and reading vocabulary. Because learners recode visual and auditory information in sequence, students practice picking up a sequence of red letters, each of which represents a sound (played for the student when the letter is picked up) while guiding a snowboarder down a mountain slope. The ultimate goal of the exercise is to recreate the original sequence of letters/sounds to form a word, which develops phonological processing, phonics (sound-to-symbol mapping), and phonemic awareness.
The activities in Soda Jerk help learners develop important planning and attention abilities such as working memory. They also help develop two important features of attention: focus and selectivity. These activities encourage the use of strategies such as verbal rehearsal, which aid in the development of working memory.
Space Bumpers is another activity that is based in the SKO Amusement Park. Part carnival game, part inter-galactic battle royale, and part cognitive mind-bender, Space Bumpers develops phonemic awareness, phonics, working memory, word decoding and working memory. The activities also encourage the use of verbal rehearsal/internalized speech, chunking/reducing information, and successive processing.
Temple of Trouble develops working memory, verbal rehearsal/internalized speech, chunking/reducing information, and simultaneous processing. When students enter the Temple of Trouble they find themselves in control of a mummy who's on a mission to collect colored gems. If students collect the gems in the correct order, make their way safely back to the base station, and then recreate the order in which the gems were collected, they are rewarded with extra credits. However, there's danger at every turn, and if students aren't careful, they could be captured by monsters who's mission is to thwart their progress whenever possible!
Wake Thrash develops successive processing, phonemic awareness, mapping sounds to letters, the use of speech as a rehearsal strategy, and the decoding of short words. In this activity, students are required to collect - in a specific order - the symbols (letters) representing sounds (phonemes) that are played at the beginning of each round. Early levels present simple CVC words and progress to multi-syllable and pseudo words.