Math, reading & music
Ten minutes. Once a day. That is the whole idea.
A parent puts a few small tasks on a calendar. A child opens the app and works through what is there — some arithmetic, a short article, a few notes on a staff — pitched at the level their age and their last few sessions say they are ready for. Then it is done, and the app has nothing else to offer them.
Not three apps behind one icon. The same calendar, the same profiles and the same report cover all three, so a day’s practice is a single list.
84 question types · kindergarten to 6th grade
Addition through division with remainders, then fractions, decimals, negatives, place value, rounding, money, sequences, comparisons, missing operands and word problems. Nine grade bands, each a weighted mix of skills rather than one drill repeated.
270 articles · nine levels
Kindergarten through eighth grade. Every article is followed by multiple-choice questions on the main idea, a detail, a word in context, an inference or the theme — and from level five up, a wrong answer sends the reader back to the paragraph that holds it instead of just marking the box red.
Five levels · staff, intervals, chords
Notes on a staff the app draws itself, line by line. Levels run from naturals on the treble clef to both clefs with accidentals, picking up intervals, chords and multi-note reading on the way. Answer by naming the note or by playing it — and the keys sound, so a child hears what they are reading.
The calendar
Tasks belong to a date, and that is the whole organising idea. A parent lays out the week on Sunday evening; the child opens the app and finds today already decided. No menu to browse, nothing to choose, nothing to negotiate about.
Setting one up
Left alone, Acorn chooses from the child’s age and how the last few sessions went — fewer questions on a skill they have above ninety percent, more on the one they keep missing. Turn that off and every level is a checkbox you can weight yourself. Either way you see the actual questions before you commit, and the task you create is the set you reviewed rather than a fresh roll of the dice.
Kid mode
One question at a time, and no running score. Grading happens quietly and the result waits until the end, because a child who can watch their percentage slipping stops thinking about the question in front of them. No streak animation, no coins, no character to feed.
Afterwards
Seven, thirty or ninety days of it: tasks finished, how long an answer takes, and a pass rate for every individual skill rather than one number for “math”. The figure you see is always the first attempt — retries do not launder it — so a skill that needs another week cannot hide behind a second go.
On iPad
The reading screen stops being a scroll and becomes a split: the whole passage on the left, the question on the right, and no thumb-scrolling back and forth to check what the second paragraph actually said.
The hard part of daily practice is not day one. It is day forty, and the week after a holiday, and the subject nobody in the house enjoys.
Finish a task and whatever was wrong or skipped becomes a short second round, then a third. The first-pass score is kept separately and never overwritten, so a retry is practice rather than a way to fix the number.
A profile for each child, with their own birthday, their own level in each subject and their own calendar. Nothing is shared between them except the app itself.
A child who is not yet reading fluently can listen instead and still answer the questions — which is a different skill from decoding, and worth practising on its own.
Any task can carry a time limit, or none at all. Twenty questions with no clock is a calm twenty minutes; the same twenty against five minutes is a different exercise entirely.
No account, no sign-up, no analytics. Profiles, tasks and answers stay on the device, and the App Store lists the app as collecting no data at all.
No shop, no currency, no chat, nobody else in the app. A child who finishes their tasks is finished, which is the point.
Creating profiles and daily tasks needs Acorn Pro, $4.99 a month, starting with a 3-day free trial in the US and Canada. It renews until you cancel, and you cancel it in Settings like everything else. One subscription covers every child on the device.
Acorn is an iPhone and iPad app for daily practice in math, reading and music. A parent puts a few small tasks on a calendar, and a child works through them in kid mode, pitched at the level their age and their last few sessions say they are ready for.
Acorn’s math covers kindergarten to 6th grade in nine grade bands, and its 270 reading articles run from kindergarten through 8th grade in nine levels. Music has five levels, from naturals on the treble clef to both clefs with accidentals.
Acorn is free to download; creating profiles and daily tasks needs Acorn Pro, $4.99 a month, starting with a 3-day free trial in the US and Canada. It renews until you cancel it in Settings, and one subscription covers every child on the device.
No. Acorn has no ads, no shop, no in-app currency, no chat and nobody else in the app — a child who finishes their tasks is finished.
Yes. Acorn runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS 17 or later, and on iPad the reading screen puts the whole article and the question side by side.
No. Acorn has no account, no sign-up and no analytics; profiles, tasks and answers stay on the device, and the App Store lists the app as collecting no data at all.
Yes. Acorn gives each child a profile with their own birthday, their own level in each subject and their own calendar, and one Acorn Pro subscription covers every child on the device.
Yes. Acorn reads its articles aloud, so a child who is not yet reading fluently can listen instead and still answer the comprehension questions.
Bugs, questions and feature requests go to our Discord forum, in the open, where you can see what has already been reported and what is being worked on. Say which subject, which level and what you expected instead — that is usually enough to find it.