An Era of Designing Habits! Creating Lifelong Good Habits for Elementary School Children

- 'Olleh TV Homeschool', systematic learning management with AI life record... Helping elementary self-directed learning
- Popular 'iMug' for cultivating proper media viewing habits and home visit reading habit service 'Bookchingu'

“Forming habits that last until eighty... Now is the golden time”

Children have basic daily habits they need to learn during early childhood, when they develop personality and emotional growth after infancy. As the saying goes, “Old habits die hard,” habits formed early in life significantly influence adulthood, so parents need to carefully manage proper habit formation.

Generally, childcare experts view the elementary school years, from ages 7 to 12, as the period when children’s basic daily habits are established. Accordingly, kindergarten curricula and integrated subjects in first and second grades emphasize the importance of establishing proper daily habits over immediate academic performance.

What are the ways to naturally cultivate proper daily habits according to each environment, including self-directed learning habits essential for stable performance across all subjects starting from elementary school admission, media viewing habits as a basic literacy in the post-COVID era, and reading habits that enrich children’s imagination and vocabulary?

Creating Self-Directed Learning Habits for Elementary Students, ‘KT Olleh tv Homeschool X AI Home Run’

Due to COVID-19, all grades from elementary to high school have been unable to freely access schools and private academies, making homeschooling essential to fill educational gaps. For elementary students, who are just beginning to establish their learning framework, cultivating self-directed study habits has become even more important.

At this time, using an elementary home learning platform enables not only the development of basic learning abilities through self-direction but also systematic and detailed management via AI tutors. In response to the growing demand for non-face-to-face education services, KT launched the smart elementary home learning service ‘Olleh tv Homeschool X AI Home Run’ with the catchphrase “AI elementary learning that teaches itself.”

‘Olleh tv Homeschool’ is a dedicated application jointly developed by KT and domestic edutech company Icecream Edu for online elementary learning. Its most representative feature is the ‘AI Life Record Book’ service. By analyzing over 15,000 learning data points daily, it provides hyper-personalized learning services tailored to learners’ aptitudes and tendencies, including guidance on completion rates, accuracy rates, learning order and patterns, problem-solving time, characteristics of correct and incorrect questions, and bad habits. This allows feedback on total learning time and detailed insights into which subjects and parts were studied down to the minute.

Within Olleh tv Homeschool, users can access premium learning content for all grades necessary for managing elementary school grades through Icecream Edu’s elementary homeschool service ‘AI Home Run,’ as well as 3 million future-oriented multimedia contents (AR, VR, 3D, etc.) fully linked to the curriculum.

KT introduced a multi-profile policy allowing up to two learners per account so that families with multiple children can use Olleh tv Homeschool without the burden of private education costs. They also offer the ‘Olleh tv Prime Homeschool’ plan, bundling Olleh tv and AI Home Run services to reduce fees. Existing Olleh tv customers can use the service at 77,660 KRW per month (VAT included, based on a 3-year contract) with multi-device discounts applied. Compared to other smart home learning services for elementary students, which typically cost around 100,000 KRW per month (based on a 24-month contract), Olleh tv Homeschool is highly competitive in terms of price.

Elementary Students Growing More Familiar with Media! Easy Proper Viewing Habits with One App, ‘iMug’

Browsing parenting community posts reveals many parents worried about their children becoming accustomed to smartphones and other devices after entering elementary school and socializing with friends, making usage control difficult.

Recently, an application that helps protect weakened eyesight from frequent smartphone use and fosters proper media viewing habits has gained popularity among parents. ‘iMug’ is a media viewing management service based on YouTube, which children frequently watch.

First, iMug automatically measures the distance between the child and the smartphone using the camera during media viewing. If the device is closer than the set distance, the video automatically pauses, helping protect eyesight from close-range viewing. To prevent traffic accidents caused by watching videos while walking, it detects smartphone shaking or movement and temporarily stops the video.

Additionally, it supports viewing time settings that allow YouTube playback only during designated times and search keyword settings that expose only videos related to user-defined keywords, helping children develop proper YouTube viewing habits. It also offers various features such as removing provocative ads and blocking videos containing prohibited words, alleviating concerns about harmful content.

Forming Reading Habits Missed During Preschool, Sungwon iBookland ‘Book Friend’

Many parents consider reading habits as important as study habits. While they wonder how to get their children to find and enjoy books on their own, forcing children to read anything is not a solution because preferences and ways of engaging with books vary individually.

Sungwon iBookland’s ‘Book Friend’ service is a non-face-to-face book delivery service that sends 208 books annually, 16 books monthly, and 4 books weekly at desired times to homes. It carefully selects over 12,000 excellent books from more than 660 domestic and international publishers and designs reading programs by type and level through experts in related fields. It especially helps form efficient reading habits by providing textbooks by grade, thematic and domain-specific books, and curriculum-linked educational comics.

For those wanting expert management of reading habits, the ‘Book Friend Reading Habit’ service is available. A teacher visits the home once a week to read books together, check difficult words to aid understanding, and conduct activities that encourage diverse expressions of book reviews. It also offers reading diagnosis, reading guides, and reading history management for more systematic and reliable child reading management.

Kim Hoon-bae, Executive Director of KT Media Platform Business Division, said, “Due to COVID-19, children’s time spent at home has increased, leading to more frequent situations where they must independently engage in activities such as learning, media viewing, and reading, causing difficulties for both parents and children. Appropriately utilizing platforms or programs that help cultivate self-directed attitudes and habits will aid in forming proper daily habits.”