FREE for limited time – Classic Tales: 3 Little Pigs. From Italian developer, Jekolab Srl, comes a cute & colorful, interactive version of the classic tale – 3 Little Pigs. Kids can choose to have the story read to them or they can read it one their own. This educational app can easily be switched to 4 different languages: English, French, Italian, or Spanish – making it great resource for a foreign language class! Nicely done with a happy ending – the pigs all get away!
FREE for a limited time – Discovery Kids Sharks for kids 6+. If your child loves sharks, this is a must-have educational app! Kids will learn: shark anatomy, types of sharks, how sharks hunt, where sharks live, and about shark families. The app includes 5 interactive games and 30 digital trading cards that can be shared via email. This app has a great mix of videos (from Discovery’s Shark Week files), fabulous photos of sharks in their natural environment, 150+ interesting shark facts, and a few games. Teachers could use the information in this app to teach a lesson on comparing and contrasting – using a Venn diagram or other graphic organizer. Kids will love learning about sharks using this fun, cool app!
From our friends at PBS comes Fetch! Lunch Rush, a very unique FREE math game app for iPhone/iPad. In this multi-player game, it is the students’ task to keep up with the lunch orders from Ruff Ruffman’s movie crew. The challenge is to keep track of how many pieces of sushi everyone wants by adding and subtracting. Before the game begins, game pieces have to be printed from the PBS website and distributed around the room. As the sushi orders come in, students have to find the game piece with the correct answer to the problem. Using the camera lens on their device, they focus in on then tap the sushi. The sushi pieces magically move to the table in front of their character (as seen above). Students have to think fast and keep moving to fill all of the sushi orders before their friends do. What a fun educational app!
Common Core Standards met:
Highly recommended!
FREE for a limited time – ToonCamera, a very cool photography app that turns photos and videos into cartoons. Using this app you can apply real-time cartoon effects to record videos, snap photos, or convert existing videos/photos. Your artistic creations can be saved or shared through email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube. There are multiple effects that you can apply to your photos – cartoon, pencil, stipple, & ink. Easy to use, this app would be great for creating the art to go with classroom projects – for stories, book reports, newsletters, etc. VERY COOL!!
Eye Paint MyDairy and EyePaint Animals are FREE again for a limited time for iPhone/iPad. These educational apps let your child paint illustrations from Japanese artist, Mitsue Haya, in a very unique way. Kids”paint” using their cameras to capture the colors, textures, patterns around them. To begin, a child chooses one of the 10 included illustrations. He/she taps to select the area to be filled in and the creativity begins! Work can be saved to the photo library for sharing or printing. Easy, fun, and very creative!!
EyePaint MyDairy EyePaint Animals
FREE for a limited time – Multiplication: Math Fact Card Matching, an educational app for kids who are learning their facts. This app combines fact practice with a memory game as kids flip cards to match an equation to its answer. The game has 3 modes – 1 player, 2 player, or play the computer. The app can be customized to have 6, 12, or 18 cards. The app can also be customized to be less or more difficult depending on the child’s level. The app also keep track of the attempts made and how many seconds it takes to match all the cards. Great for the classroom – have kids practice facts with a friend instead of doing a worksheet!
Common Core Standards met:
FREE for a limited time – Shiny Party, a math app for preschoolers. Charlie the monkey and Alice the giraffe are getting ready for their friend’s surprise birthday party. Kids learn about basic geometric shapes as they help. They find matching shapes, do shape puzzles, build cupcakes – all within the context of the story. All activities are age appropriate. Just have one minor concern about the content… the app teaches kids that a square has 4 sides rather than 4 equal sides. All in all, this educational app is great – colorful with adorable characters. Also, you can take a picture of your child with the characters and save it to your photos – a really cute feature. Nicely done and fun for little ones!
FREE for a limited time – The Amazing Train, an interactive adventure story set in India. Rajeev and Lalita have the opportunity to visit the Magnificent Train. Kids travel along with the characters to discover what make this train so special. The 3D illustrations and animations in this app are quite unique – making this story a stand out among e-books. As kids listen to or read the story, they are also introduced to the culture of India. This educational app even includes a recipe for an Indian dessert – yum! This story would be great for a social studies unit on different cultures. I love books that give kids a glimpse of how other cultures live!
FREE for a limited time – Wild Fables, an interactive version of Aesop’s fables. This educational app comes with 3 FREE fables (The Crow and The Pitcher, The Fox and The Grapes, and The Ant and The Chrysalis) and the option of purchasing 5 additional stories. Kids don’t just read they stories in this app, they play along! They help save a lion, help a fox leap for a grape, etc. as 3 of Aesop’s fables come to life. Designed to be read independently, the stories do not have a read along/aloud option. The music, effects, and accelerometer can be turned of/off in the settings. If you use Aesop’s fables in your classroom, check out this app. It could be used to introduce fables.
WOW – here’s one you don’t want to miss!! FREE again for a limited time – Cookie Next Door-Rainy Days. This educational app was a choice in the “New & Noteworthy” section of the app store in early February. Kids become storytellers in this animated adventure. Their speech, songs, and rhymes bring Cookie and his friends alive. The app includes a Creative Comic Book, a Voice Over Studio, and an Animated Stage Projector. Creative Comic Book utilizes storyboards to guide kids through the storytelling experience. In the Voice Over Studio, kids can change the pitch of the characters’ voices. As kids tell the story their speech, singing, etc. is transformed into the voices of the characters. Once the story is complete, the Animated Stage turns it into a play with dancing props! This app is very creative, very fun and it’s great for developing oral language skills. I am looking forward to more adventures of Cookie and friends!!
appydazeblog 