For teachers

The Candle School is The Table Candle's free school: a set of standards-aligned learning games from kindergarten through high school. Use them for centers, early finishers, whole-class warm-ups on a projector, intervention, or practice at home.

Teacher Desk: free class accounts

Want to see how your class is doing? Make a free teacher account. Make a class and you get a class code. Students press Join my class, type the code, and pick the seat you gave them. Seats have made-up names like "Blue Owl", so you never type a child's name into our system. You can choose which games show up first for your class, including The Hero's Trial, and see each seat's best score. Set up your school to let an admin see every class, or join one with your school's code.

Student privacy

• No student accounts, logins, names, or emails. Nothing to set up. Teacher accounts are optional and free.
• No ads, no analytics, no cookies for students (Teacher Desk uses one sign-in cookie), and no third-party scripts, fonts, or trackers. Every file comes from this site.
• Games run entirely in the browser. Nothing a student does is sent anywhere unless they join a class.
• Joining a class is optional. A student who joins sends only their scores (which game, which level, how many right) under their made-up seat name, to their teacher. We store no child names, emails, or IP addresses. Any real names a teacher types beside seats stay only in that teacher's browser.
• To keep games fresh on return visits, each device remembers (in the browser's own storage) which questions it has already seen or missed and the best score for each level. It holds no student names or personal information, never leaves the device, and can be cleared at any time with the button below. On shared computers, clearing it gives the next student a fresh start.
• Pictures that students draw can be saved only to their own device.
• Read-aloud uses the voice built into your device or browser; no audio is recorded and no microphone is used.

Clear progress on this device

The houses and their guides

Subjects are grouped into three houses named for the Three Brothers, who watch over the three moons in The Table Candle's world: Knowledge (Sabel), Skill (Torren), and Luck (Pug). Each subject has a guide: Sabel for reading and social studies, Lumen for science, Torren for math and coding, Marra for art and music, Nexus for quests, and Pug for health and feelings. The houses are only a way to find things; every game stays in its subject and grade.

The story behind the school

In the story, The Candle School was founded by Miyamoto Musashi. Nexus pulled him into Babylon just after he wrote The Book of Five Rings, to help seal away Gankorn, and afterward he stayed and opened a free school for the children of Babylon, and ours. Musashi is away on another adventure right now, so Ms. Ash is the main teacher, and the Brothers and Daughters teach beside her. The school's motto, which he gave it, is: “There is not one way up the mountain. There is only the Way, and your path on it is your own. Understand, grow, and change, and you will reach the top.” The full story is on the Characters page.

The story is only for students to enjoy. It does not change any lesson or standard. Miyamoto Musashi was a real person; the story about him is fiction, and the motto is our own, written by The Table Candle, and The Candle School is not connected with any group, museum, or school that uses his name. You are welcome to use the characters in your own classroom teaching.

Found a mistake? Want to help?

The Candle School is checked by hand, but a teacher's eye catches things we miss. If you find a wrong answer, a word the read-aloud says strangely, or a game that could teach something better, please tell us. If you would like to help write games, questions, or lessons, we would love to hear from you too.

Write to the school

It goes to a real person at The Table Candle, and we write back. Please do not include a student's name.

How to use it

• Teach from a curriculum? Pick yours on the Curriculum page. Every unit shows its lessons, the games that fit each one, a plan, a one-page plan for each lesson, and a unit kit to print. One button assigns the unit's games to your class in Teacher Desk. No curriculum listed? “Go by standards” works with any of them.
• Print it: every game has free printables: a teacher page with a 40-minute lesson, a worksheet, an answer key that explains each answer, exit tickets, and a card game for classrooms without screens. The questions are new every time you print. They're black and white, light on ink, and free to copy.
• Send students to one game: open the game and use its Share button, or copy the address. Each game has its own link (for example #fractions).
• Differentiate: most games have Easy, Medium, and Hard levels. Younger students can use the read-aloud buttons.
• Grade filter: the grade you choose on the games page is remembered on that device only.
• Fresh every time: math and logic problems are generated new each play. Word and fact games draw from large checked question banks, show new questions first, and bring back the ones a student missed. Most games also have a Challenge mode that keeps going and gets harder.
• Accessibility: large tap targets, keyboard support, reduced motion honored, and a font designed for beginning readers.

Every game, with its standards

Standards listed are the closest matches in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the C3 Framework for Social Studies, the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS), the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, the National Health Education Standards (NHES), the CASEL framework, and the National Standards for Personal Financial Education (Council for Economic Education and Jump$tart Coalition, 2021). Please check them against your own state and district standards.

The fine print

• Free and as is. The Candle School is free and provided as is, without any warranty. We check the games by hand and fix mistakes when we find them, but we cannot promise every answer is perfect. Please check anything you teach from it, including the standards listed.
• Not a replacement for a teacher. The games are practice and play. They are not a curriculum, a test, or a grade.
• Using the characters. The characters, story, and pictures belong to The Table Candle. Teachers may use them free for classroom teaching and in their own class materials. Please do not sell them or use them to advertise something else.
• Notes you send us. If you write to the school, we keep your name, email, note, and the network address it came from, only to answer you, fix the problem, and stop spam. Ask us and we will delete it. If you send a correction, an idea, a question, or something you made for the school, you give The Table Candle permission to use it in the school for free, and we will credit you if you ask. Please only send things that are yours to share, and never a student's name or personal information.
• For grown-ups. The form is for teachers, parents, and other adults. Students should ask a grown-up to write to us for them.
• Curricula and standards. The Curriculum page lines our games up with curricula teachers already use. For openly licensed curricula we show unit and lesson titles, learning goals, and standards, credited as each license asks, and link to the publisher for the lessons themselves. For other curricula we list only unit titles so you can find your place; we never copy their lessons. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by any publisher named on this site, and their names are used only to say which curriculum a page lines up with. When we match a unit to standards ourselves, the page says so. The Candle School is free and has no ads, which the non-commercial licenses of some of these curricula require.
• Check before you print. Printables are made fresh each time and checked by computer, but please read every page before you hand it out. You know your class and your standards best.

Credits

• U.S. map: "Blank US Map (states only)" by Heitordp, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (public domain dedication).
• World map: adapted from "Continents.svg", Wikimedia Commons, public domain; Antarctica and New Zealand drawn simply for this site.
• Fonts: Andika by SIL International and Fredoka by the Fredoka Project Authors, SIL Open Font License 1.1 (license texts in the fonts folder).
• Common Core State Standards: © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Standard text is quoted under the CCSS public license.
• Next Generation Science Standards: NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. NGSS is a registered trademark of WestEd; neither WestEd nor the lead states and partners were involved in producing, and do not endorse, this site.
• Standards text was taken from the public CASE packages on OpenSALT (opensalt.net).
• Curriculum credits appear on each curriculum's pages on the Curriculum page.
• Pictures: hand-carved-print style illustrations made for this site with AI image tools.
• Guides: Sabel, Torren, Pug, Nexus, Lumen, and Marra are characters from The Table Candle's world, drawn as storybook illustrations with AI image tools from The Table Candle's own miniature designs.