Concept: Operations, Counting/Reasoning, Number Recognition
Age: 3 to 5
Price: $4.99
Device: iPad
Elmo Loves 123s is a complete number sense experience to prepare young children for counting, number recognition, addition and subtraction. Join Elmo to learn the numbers 1 through 20 with vidoes, games and coloring. Abbie talks kids through a series of 1 to 1 correspondence, modeled early addition and subtraction play that is prefect for young kids. There is tons of language in the app and each game is incredibly supportive. Parents you get a full report, right in the app, of what activities your child has been doing, their success percentage and what numbers your child has been favoring. Overall, one of the best number sense apps we’ve played.
Drawnimal brings your child into the ABC experience with the inclusion of drawing around the iPad or iPhone. Each letter has a short drawing modeled in the app which your child can simply copy. Then with a tap, the drawing comes alive, from a roaring lion to an alligator giving a mighty chomp. Drawnimal currently includes in-app purchase for all the letters after C. This app is available in 4 languages and uses Canadian English.
Price: FREE (with in-app purchase for extra pictures and packs)
Device: Universal
Knock Knock Family is a customizable app for young children to interact with friends, family and anything else you want to hide behind the door. The play is simple, you see a picture hidden behind a door and hear two knocks. Then the child voice in the app says, “Whose there?” Your child taps to open the door and learn who is waiting to say Hi. Drag a little gift to your new friend and the app praises you, sending small confettis onto the screen. The praise can get very repetative, but the game play is very engaging for our youngest app users. We really love that parents and kids can customize the app with their own pictures, text, speech and choosing a special gift for each guest.
Pretend uses beautiful hand drawn artwork, with room for your child’s face, to encourage storytelling. Choose an illustration, add a picture and tell a story about your picture. There are plenty of story starters given right in the app if you need an idea. This is an iPhone only app which means kids are typing on a small screen. With younger kids, parents will have to support the story writing. This app also has lots of buttons for logging into the Juddly platform and kids won’t be able to access the complete app if you aren’t logged in to Juddly.
Subject: Language
Category: Comprehension, Pre-Reading, Reading
Concept: Phonics, Reading, Word Play
Age: 5 to 8
Price: $0.99 this Friday and Saturday only (Original price: $2.99)
Device: iPad
Developed by a teacher who saw a need in the app market, Spider’s Lunch is the first in a series of apps that helps kids focus in on spelling, rhyming, and the process of blending to decode words. In addition to solid game play for learning to read, Spider’s Lunch is one of the few apps that presents kids with an opportunity to read words in context and take a kid-friendly comprehension quiz.
Kid’s enter the app and meet a encouraging caterpillar who really wants you to learn to read. She supports kids through games in each of the five areas of the app. She talks quite a bit in the app! A thoughtful design feature is that she uses the language similar to what your child’s classroom teacher might say.
There is no pressure in the app. Play at your own pace, you’ll find no timers or messages in the app that encourage kids to work quickly. Kids also have to work through each of the activities in order, and with a tap of the caterpillar guide, can go back and replay a previous area. It doesn’t take a long time to complete the full app but once you do, kids can easily go back and replay any of the five games:
Word Building
Story Reading and Comprehension
Matching: Words to Pictures
Rhyming
Roll a Word
Spider’s Lunch is perfect for kids who flourish on focused repetition. There isn’t much variety in the activities and the pace is slow, which is ideal for kids who get distracted with all the hot-spots and noises in many early learning apps. There are four more apps planned in the series, but we’d like to see an opportunity to unlock more words in this app.
Show What You Know
Do-it-Yourself Word Games
Today’s first activity is a sneak peek into an activity from KinderTown’s Phonics Power Pack, Level K.
When practicing phonics and blending with your child, keeping the activity fresh and exciting is important. Keep a variety of these items around your home and add them to your learning play when you need to try something new.
With phonics play, you need to have an isolated initial sound followed by a word family like /ig/, /at/ or /en/. Using any of the suggested materials, you can create a mini-phonics game for your child.
Suggested Materials: plastic eggs, index cards (spiral bound), paper plates, popsicle sticks, paper tubes, sticky notes
Plastic Egg: Print 5 consonants on one half of the shell. Print 5 “vowel + consonant” combinations on the other half. Your child turns the shell and makes a new word to sound out each time. Young should start with the lip boppers: B, P, M, S, and T
Index Cards: Cut the index cards into thirds. Print a consonant in the first column, a vowel in the second and then another consonant for each page. Flip through the pages, creating words and sounding them out. Use this flip book to support your child’s writing too. Have him build the words with the flip book first, and then use each word in his writing.
Paper Plates: Cut a small square in the top paper plate. Following the square, write a word family group like /at/ or /og/. Attach a second plate with a brad or paperclip and write consonants so they show through the square you cut in the top plate.
Get more activity ideas for supporting your emerging reader by perusing the Power Packs tab in KinderTown.
Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high… If you can finish the ending of this acclaimed theme song from the well-loved educational TV series, Reading Rainbow, then today’s video review is for you and your kids.
LaVar Burton and the Reading Rainbow team has gone digital with an app that brings books, videos, adventures, and learning to your child’s fingertips. Designed to give kids plenty of choice, the app takes you into thematic islands filled with books and videos to explore. Parents help tailor the content and receive reports on their child’s achievements in the app.
In the words of LaVar Burton, You don’t have to take my word for it. Take two minutes and see Reading Rainbow in action for yourself.
Subject: Language, Social Studies, Science
Category: Vocabulary, Pre-Reading, Reading, People and Places, Investigation
Concept: Reading, Listening
Age: 3 to 8
Price: FREE (with in-app purchase subscription)
Device: iPad
Reading Rainbow takes kids on journeys with books, videos and as always – their imagination! In the app kids find thematic islands with fiction and nonfiction books to add to their personal book backpack. Besides books, kids can choose from a variety of video field trips which are updated weekly. Parents need to get involved in logging in and managing the subscription model that gives your child access to the complete library. Reading Rainbow has a lot of offer and is a child-safe platform once you set up a reading subscription.
Disney Princess: Story Theater is a delightful storytelling experience for kids who love the Disney Princesses. The app has a structured storytelling experience and free play space allowing storytelling to emerge. In both areas you will find Disney princesses, their unique settings, supporting characters and props. Kids use an easy to navigate in app recording feature to share their own stories. The app provides freedom for exploration while supporting your child to tell the beginning, middle and end of stories. You will find unlocked buttons in the lower corner for a view of the collection of Disney apps that with a tap take you to the app store.
The Adventures of Puppup: Lost at the Zoo is a dynamic tale of a pup who gets lost from his family on a visit to zoo. Kids meet a variety of animals and are exposed to rich vocabulary while listening to the story. The music, graphics and interactivity are all well crafted and kid-friendly. The story is quite long and integrates limited features. The words are not highlighted, there is no control to turn off narration or option tap to re-read each page or individual words. The story is perfect for asking questions, thinking through the details and practicing a variety of comprehension skills.
Language Adventures Quiz Game Show from Lakeshore Learning gets mixed reviews from KinderTown, but still makes our recommendation list for presenting a wealth of language topics not commonly seen in educational apps, yet strong for classroom use. The app quizzes students with multiple choice questions around topics of parts of speech, analogies, fact vs. opinion and library skills. The game play gets up to four teams to play Jeopardy style. While we recommend this app, it comes with a few forewarnings too. There are open links to get more Lakeshore apps at the end of the app. The flow of the game and placement of the buttons can get in the way of motivating kids to think together to answer given problems.
Brand New App!
iLuv Drawing Vehicles HD
Subject: Art, Social Studies
Category: Creativity, Drawing, People and Places
Age: 3 to 8
Device: iPad
Price: $1.99
iLuv Drawing Vehicles is a step-by-step drawing app with a variety of features that encourage creativity and let kids easily share with loved ones. Perfect for kids who love trucks, trains, cars and planes, you’ll find a wealth of drawing tools and thematic stickers in an easy to use interface. Mistakes are easily corrected with a undo and redo button. Painting can be done with the drag of the finger or using the easy paint fill tool. The iLuv Drawing apps are also consistently updated with new features added every few months. There are buttons on the home screen that take you out of the app, but once you get into the drawing kids are kept focused on the drawings.
Pepi Tree is filled with mini games kids love to play, and just enough learning that parents will be happy too. Enter the forest and navigate between 5 levels to watch a caterpillar turn into a butterfly, play hide and seek with forest animals, feed squirells till they are so full and fall asleep, and more. Each mini game is quick and doesn’t show a full science experience, but is just enough to get kids thinking and becoming familiar with science themes. Most of the activities are repetitive, but there is flexibility built into the interaction for kids to discovery in varied ways. You will find links in this app, but nothing aggressive.
Hippo Seasons responds to your child’s touch for discovering the four seasons. This free exploration app feels more like a toy than a traditional kids app. In each season kids tap, swipe, shake and blow to reveal and create with the thematic seasonal scenes. Winter has snow play, spring blends water and colorful flowers, summer has an interactive lawn and fall is filled with leaves. A very good app that uses no timers or directions, just your child’s imagination!
Why does Julia wear glasses and I don’t? Where is Jackie’s Dad? She has two Moms.
These are the questions kids ask (usually in very public places) and parents get to answer in the most diplomatic and understanding ways. Well, parents you just got a new resource to help you in these discussions! Today’s Show & Tell app, Wee You-Things, is an interactive story that helps kids learn to see and appreciate the differences we all have.
Wee You-Things is a kid-friendly app that introduces over 20 unique (and often silly) characters that all have a special You-Thing. You-Things are the unique things that everyone has. Instead of ignoring these You-Things, this app gives kids a safe place to notice, ask questions and learn to appreciate all these special differences that people have.
Some of our favorite characters and their You-Things are:
Kyle with a ginormous smile, Potter who lives in the water, Clair who has no hair, CJ who only wears her PJs (we all have that You-Thing from time to time), and Pierre who runs with his arms in the air.
As you can tell, this very serious app is also filled with funny, laughable moments. Crafted with beautiful artistry and storytelling, Wee You-Things is sure to be a favorite in your home! We love when kids can’t get enough of stories that tell important messages.
Show What You Know
Activity 1: What Do I Look Like?
Helping kids make sense of the similarities and differences between people of the world is a challenging and important task for parents. In the classroom, teachers are also helping kids work through a quickly broadening understanding of the great variety of qualities people have.
This activity, which I now pass on to you, is a favorite that a parent once shared with me.
You’ll Need:
Paper (Try a variety of shapes, sizes and materials)
Art Supplies
The objective of this activity is to get your kids thinking about how they look and feel. You will need to plan a week or two allowing you to gather a variety of drawings.
Day 1: As your child to draw a picture of his face. You don’t need to give any more directions. He can choose a piece of paper or draw on a paper plate using colors and art supplies. When he is done, collect the drawing to save for a later date.
Day 2: Ask your child to draw another picture of his face. Again leave him to create as he see fit. Today might be a face in the color green or a face that is half the size as yesterday. When finished, save the drawing.
Day 3 to (however many!): Continue asking you child to draw his face. After he is done, bring out the other drawings from previous days. Take a few minutes to look at the drawings and point out what is the same and different on each picture. Maybe one day he has a big red nose and on another he had no nose.
Without critiquing the drawing (that isn’t the point) discuss how what we think about ourself changes. Some days we feel as a big as a mountain and others as small as a mouse. Some days we love our curly hair and other days we want to have no hair at all. By helping your child think through his own feelings about himself, and how they change, you are starting to encourage a sense of our feelings and forming sensitivity to others varied feelings.
Activity 2: A Very Important Question
This activity is short. It is something you can do with your child often. It might take 20 seconds or 20 minutes. It’s really up to you and your child. What’s most important is that you ask the Question and never stop.
The question: How are you feeling?
The strategy: You ask your child and listen to their answer. Then your child asks you. Here is the challenge, you need to answer. You might have to carefully craft an answer or just be completely honest. By talking about your feelings, and encouraging your child to talk about hers, you are modeling and practicing together how to think about and express the feelings everyone has.
Animal Planet Hide & Seek Pets welcomes kids in to learn about common household pets and playfully entertain themselves with early learning games. A spin of the hamster wheel leads kids to tap and swipe, revealing 1 of 6 household pets cutely hiding from view. Kids then have a wide open play screen! They can tap to learn interesting facts, choose from of a nice variety of learning games or leave the pet to create some music or art.
We highly recommend Animal Planet Hide & Seek Pets for young children! Before you buy, take two minutes to see the app for yourself.
Animal Planet Hide & Seek Pets
Subject: Science
Category: Life Science, Investigation
Age: 3 to 5
Price: $3.99
Device: Universal
Animal Planet Hide & Seek Pets has lots of playful learning areas for kids. Designed with young app user in mind, the games are easy to play and quite entertaining. The learning in the app is centered around household pets. You’ll find interesting facts that are easy to expand and talk about away from the app. Other games in the app include tracing, counting, coloring, making music, sticker play, memory match, spot the difference and more! A nice playful app built around a childhood favorite theme of pets.
Wee You-Things is a beautiful app that shares an important message. You-things are all those unique things about people. The message in the app is that we all have you-things and that is what makes us special. Kids are greeted by over 20 unique characters to learn about each ones you-thing. Interactivity on the page highlights, in some very funny ways, the characters special quality. What we love about this book is that it opens up so many possibilities for conversations between adults and kids. You-Things is an excellent social learning app that is a must have for your kids.
Animal Planet Hide & Seek Pets has lots of playful learning areas for kids. Designed with young app user in mind, the games are easy to play and quite entertaining. The learning in the app is centered around household pets. You’ll find interesting facts that are easy to expand and talk about away from the app. Other games in the app include tracing, counting, coloring, making music, sticker play, memory match, spot the difference and more! A nice playful app built around a childhood favorite theme of pets.
Discover Paris takes kids on a tour through 11 key sites in Paris to learn about art, history and important places of French culture. The app uses narration from a simply animated owl over the top of quality images of Paris. Kids interact and learn by answering question asked by the owl but overall the experience in mostly passive. Discover Paris uses rich vocabulary and facts which parents can even enjoy and may want to clarify for young children. This app is part of a larger series of educational apps from Seven Academy. You’ll find options to log in and set up an account to manage your child’s progress and learning. This app has a very long initial load time and is free to try with in-app purchases (which can be turned off in the settings).
Go Nini is a free app from the Fred Rogers Center that gives parents and kids a game to start talking about eating healthy foods. NiNi loves to run and jump but he needs healthy foods to keep going all day. Your child’s job is to choose from GO, SLOW and WHOA foods to keep NiNi active and strong. The game has NiNi running along a road with your child tapping to help him jump over obstacles. There is not much in the app to keep your child playing over the long term, but there are great possibilities for learning about healthy foods as parents and kids play Go Nini together.
ABCmouse.com 26 A-Z Music Videos is a collection of letter learning and vocabulary expanding videos for kids. Each video focuses on one letter sound and words that begin with that sound. Features in the app include options to see the text of the song as the video plays, an informative parents page for each letter, and a full glossary with a read aloud options. The app is structured so you get 5 videos for free. Then as you watch videos kids earn tickets. These tickets are collected to purchase more videos. It will take quite a bit of video watching to earn enough tickets to unlock more videos so we recommend downloading the full version off the app via in-app purchase. Be aware that this app currently doesn’t have you create an account which means that purchases made with tickets only (not the in-app purchase) do not transfer between devices.
By Jeanne Voelker, Curriculum Director, Early Ascent, LLC
Early Ascent LLC, the creators of the award-winning Reading Raven app, has just released Reading Raven Vol 2 HD. In this post we’ll talk about some of the challenges of developing a successful sequel to the original app. One such challenge was to build fun and engaging games that reinforce learning skills covered in Reading Raven HD and introduce additional reading strategies to advance young readers. We’ll also discuss how parents and educators can help children learn with Reading Raven Vol 2 HD.
Learning happens best when there is a balance between repetition and variety. To learn, we need material that is familiar enough to help connect the new information or concepts to what we already know. And, the material needs to be novel enough to keep our interest.
As in the original Reading Raven, children again are guided by the raven who praises their efforts, sometimes encouraging them to “try again”. The game procedures are similar. Children read aloud and hear their own recorded voices. They spell (encode) and write words. Readers once again meet the characters Meg, her little brother, Sam, their friend Tim, and Gus the dog.
As to what’s new, Reading Raven, Volume 2, presents all new scenarios, backgrounds and images and all new lessons to advance reading skills. Children have fun navigating through treasure boxes, dinosaurs, camera-friendly meerkats, and so much more that they hardly notice that they are learning! The child who plays the games learns to read blend words, silent-e words, and words of many types, grouped by spelling patterns, then mixed with others in sentences and stories.
Reading Raven Vol 2 HD presents an abundance of new material. Example: In Volume 1, the beginning reader learned to read “tan”. Volume 2 builds on this knowledge when the child learns to read “thank”. To read “thank”, a child must learn that the digraph “th” makes a sound that is neither a “t” sound nor an “h” sound. Similarly, he learns how to pronounce the blend “nk”, not the easiest blend, but learning with multi-sensory Reading Raven makes it fun and easy!
Parents and teachers can help children learn with Reading Raven Vol 2 HD by helping them see small differences in spellings, and by adjusting the settings to the appropriate level for each child. Feedback from all of our Reading Raven users indicates that skills learned from Reading Raven transfer very well to reading books of the same level. Parents and teachers can help enable this transfer by pointing out words in a book or on a sign that look “just like” or “almost like” words in Reading Raven.
In Reading Raven Vol 2 HD children learn to read more complex words, sentences and stories. They also find out what Meg wants, what little brother Sam learns about nature, and how Gus the dog surprises everyone! Happy reading!
Jeanne Voelker has been teaching children how to read for more than twenty-seven years. Through her program, Reading Before School, she has helped countless children, including some suffering from physical and learning disabilities, build a strong reading foundation. Many of her students have gone on to earn degrees and advanced degrees from major universities around the country. She has a BA in English literature and composition from the University of Washington and has published several short stories.
Today, I’m letting all of you in on a little secret. I (Carolina) don’t like worksheets and workbooks, especially in apps for young kids. Yes, we all come at these things with some sort of bias, and the people at KinderTown are no different – but for good reason! I like kids to be creative, challenged and exposed to rich technology experiences. With most apps I am looking for the good, the moments of educational value, so we can approve them. This is not usually the case when I open up a workbook-style app.
Our Show & Tell app, Splash Math Kindergarten, is, well, hard not to be called a workbook app. Yet, it is the most thorough workbook-style app I’ve ever played! It’s also an app I would have gladly used in my Kindergarten classroom. Not only is the app completely engaging for young children, the adult features and customizations add incredible depth to the content.
Aligned to the common core curriculum (and other typical math content kids in the US experience in Kindergarten) Splash Math Kindergarten is able to provide kids a wealth of math learning or focus specifically in an area your child needs some more explicit practice on. This is critical for teachers and parents to customize the app based on an individual child’s needs.
What kids experience in the app are a series of 10 questions which are answered multiple choice and fill in the blank. The app is supportive with intuitive design helping kids count aloud and giving direct feedback when answering a question incorrectly. You’ll find the series of activities are varied enough to be interesting, but still connected around one skill area (instead of having kids jump around from shapes to counting to adding).
Coming from a reviewer that rarely raves over a workbook app, Splash Math Kindergarten has tremendous value! See the features for yourself in this short two minute video review on Time to Play.
Show What You Know
Transform your workbooks and printables into rich play experiences! Don’t let those pages of your child’s artwork and connect the dots go to waste. Here are two creative ideas for stretching out the life of kids workbooks.
Activity 1: Turn Your Workbooks Into a Board Game
Standard kids board games typically contain four items:
A path to travel (the game board)
Markers unique to each player
A spinner or dice for setting the quantity of places to move
A challenge to complete to move your piece
Tell your kids that and they will make their own board game in a matter of minutes. It might end up more elaborate than Candy Land, but the game with be theirs. Encourage them to look at other board games and think about what different spaces can be labeled as (for example: lose a turn, go back two).
Next take out a workbook that you have around the house. Cut out the individual problems on each page and glue them to pieces of cardboard or construction paper. Your kids now have a set of game cards to use for their board game. When it’s your turn, flip over a game card and solve the problem (or complete the activity). If you solve the card correctly you get to move ahead!
It’s up to you in this activity if you want your game cards to be reusable or not. Kids can just solve the problem right on the cards. Which you might want to do if you are playing this game with younger kids. You can also keep paper close by for working out problems so you can use your cards again and again.
Activity 2: What to do with Leftover Workbooks
Kids (and their parents) love workbooks, however once they are used up what can be done with them? One thing I know for a fact is that kids love cutting things. Just using a scissors, paper and glue, you can transform these used up workbooks into new activities. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Rainbow Alphabet: Have your child cut out one of each letter of the alphabet from the workbook. On the floor or a table, arrange them alphabetical order. Arrange the letter in the shape of a rainbow by putting A in lower left and Z in lower right with M at the top making an arch. If you want to divide it into quadrants add E and T. Once the rainbow is complete game play starts. (Can also be done with magnetic letters on the fridge).
Florida Center for Reading Research has a template of the alphabet arc (rainbow) to help you get started.
2. Numberline: Make your own number line by cutting apart an old workbook.
3. Create a Rebus Story: Our workbooks are filled with pictures the kids have colored. Cut out 5 pictures from the workbook and arrange them on a piece of paper. Have your child tell you a short story inspired from these pictures. Turn it into a rebus story by writing simple words you child can decode (read) inbetween the pictures.
KinderTown Power Packs are “mini” lesson plans designed specifically for parents that guide them in teaching their children specific subjects. They go beyond apps to combine learning and play. Each Power Pack has ideas for activities, games, assessments, and other materials that parents can easily do right in their home.
This week we’re focusing on how you can use Power Packs to prepare your child for Kindergarten.
Already have a Kindergartener? You’ll find educational app and activity recommendations for kids ages 3 to 8 in the KinderTown app. Just tap on the Power Pack tab!
Spring means Kindergarten enrollment and more talks with your little one about going to big kid school next year. While your child might be brimming with excitement (we hope!) for parents it can be the start of a nervous few months. Let us help you put the nerves aside with activities, apps and product recommendations that will help your child get ready for Kindergarten!
Today I am wearing the Kindergarten teacher hat to share my three favorite Language Power Packs for getting your child prepared for those first months in school. In order to find the activities and apps on your child’s ability level, I suggest looking through both the Level PreK and Level K Power Packs.
Sound Play
Why it’s Important: Songs, rhymes, alliterations and other word games highlight the sounds in words. This sound play reinforces syllables and the ways individual sounds can be manipulated to make different words. Helping to train your child’s ear to identify and manipulate sounds pays off as your child learns to read.
Recommended Apps & Activities in the Sound Play Power Pack, Level PreK:
Vocabulary
Why it’s important: Reading, writing, communicating and comprehending takes a wealth of language. To build up your child’s language, vocabulary, provide rich experiences (not just isolated word learning) daily through conversations, books and play. When your child gets to the classroom understanding more complex academic language won’t be such a struggle.
Recommended Apps & Activities in the Vocabulary Power Pack, Level PreK:
Print Awareness
Why it’s Important: When kids get to Kindergarten they’ll (hopefully) be spending tons of time with books and reading. Letters aren’t always neatly printed in the same place every time kids go to read. Prepare kids for a world of words with plenty of experiences with books, writing and noticing print in their environment.
Recommended Apps & Activities in the Print Awareness Power Pack, Level K:
Elmo Loves 123s for iPad
DRAWNIMAL
Knock Knock Family – Toddler’s First App
Pretend: Kids Storytelling & Family Photo Fun
This activity is short. It is something you can do with your child often. It might take 20 seconds or 20 minutes. It’s really up to you and your child. What’s most important is that you ask the Question and never stop.
Jeanne Voelker has been teaching children how to read for more than twenty-seven years. Through her program, Reading Before School, she has helped countless children, including some suffering from physical and learning disabilities, build a strong reading foundation. Many of her students have gone on to earn degrees and advanced degrees from major universities around the country. She has a BA in English literature and composition from the University of Washington and has published several short stories.
