The 11 things children learn in TinyLearn — and the order to try them

A new app with eleven topics on the home screen is a small decision problem. Which one does a three-year-old start with? Does the Varnamala come before or after English? Is Story Mode for the same child as Phonics?

Here is each topic, what it is for, roughly which age it suits, and what to pair it with away from the screen.

Where to start, in one line

Under three: Colours, Shapes, Animals. Three to five: add the Alphabet, Numbers and your home-language Varnamala. Five and up: Phonics, Opposites and Story Mode.

Nothing is locked, so none of this is binding — it is just the order that tends to go smoothest.

The three alphabets

Alphabet

A to Z, tap-to-hear, with an example word for each letter.

Start with the letters of your child's own name rather than at A — a child has a reason to care about those, and alphabetical order is an adult convenience. The alphabet guide covers which letters to add next and why confusable pairs like b and d should be kept apart.

Suits: roughly three and up.

Hindi Varnamala

The Hindi alphabet, tap-to-hear.

The rows of the Varnamala are grouped by where each sound is made in the mouth, which makes it far easier to learn in blocks than as a list to recite — the Varnamala guide explains the structure.

Suits: three and up, and worth starting even if your child is stronger in English.

Marathi Varnamala

The Marathi alphabet, tap-to-hear, on the same principle. If Marathi is the language at home, start here rather than with English — the Barakhadi guide covers what comes after the letters.

Suits: three and up.

Numbers

1 to 100, in English, हिंदी and मराठी.

Counting to a hundred is a memory feat; understanding that four is a quantity is the real work, which is why the counting guide spends its time on touching each object once. If your child counts confidently in English and not at home, Hindi and Marathi numbers explains why those are genuinely harder.

Suits: two and up for 1–10, growing from there.

Colours

Each colour taught through real-life examples — the sky, the grass, the sun.

Those anchors are the useful part: "is it the same as the grass?" is easier for a three-year-old to answer than "is it green?" Teach one colour at a time rather than three at once.

Suits: two and up. Often the best first topic.

Shapes

Circle, square, triangle and more.

Ask "how many corners?" rather than "what shape?" — counting corners is what lets a child still recognise a triangle when it is tilted or stretched.

Suits: two and a half up.

Phonics

Letter sounds, for early reading.

This is the topic most worth getting right, because the common mistake is saying "buh" instead of /b/ — that extra vowel is why blending stops working. The app says each sound, which helps if you are not sure yourself; the phonics guide covers blending and which sounds to teach first.

Suits: four and up, once some letters are familiar.

The word topics

Animals, with sounds. Fruits, for vocabulary. Opposites, in pairs.

These three look like the lightweight ones and quietly do a lot. Vocabulary is the half of reading that nobody talks about — a child can decode a word perfectly and still not know what it means. Building vocabulary explains why opposites and categories matter more than word lists.

Suits: two and up, all of them.

Story Mode

Guided stories.

Stories carry words that daily conversation does not — gloomy, peered, scampered — which is exactly their value. Whatever your child is listening to, the biggest gain comes from talking around it: "what do you think happens next?" Reading aloud covers how to turn a story into a conversation.

Suits: three and up.

Why everything is tap-to-hear

Every letter, number and word is spoken aloud, and that is the point rather than a feature.

A child cannot learn a sound from a shape on a screen. And many parents are not confident pronouncing every Varnamala letter — especially families abroad, where the home language has drifted after years away. Tap-to-hear means the child gets it right whether or not the adult beside them is sure.

A sensible order

• Ages 2–3 — Colours, Shapes, Animals, counting 1–10
• Ages 3–5 — Alphabet (name letters first), your home Varnamala, Numbers, Fruits
• Ages 5–8 — Phonics, Opposites, Story Mode, numbers past 20

Pick one topic and stay with it for a week or two. Eleven topics in the first session is how a child ends up knowing a little of everything and none of it well.

The learn topics page lists all eleven with what each covers, and the games are where they get practised.