Category Archives: FREE apps (for a limited time)

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ABC Wildlife

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ABC Wildlife for the iPhone/iPad is FREE again today! The educational app is geared towards 3 – 5 year olds to teach them about 80+ animals. The app opens to a grid arranged in ABC order. Kids can tap on a letter to bring up animals that begin with that letter or they can tap on a specific animal. As an animal’s photo appears, a child’s voice says the initial letter then reads the name of the animal (which appears in writing at the bottom of the screen). A little cartoon person drops down on the left hand side of the screen with a link to a video clip about that animal or an interactive scene. The child can scroll to the left for additional pictures & videos about each animal. There is also an exclamation point to tap on each page that gives an interesting fact about the animal pictured.

This app needs an internet connection to work because the 100+ videos are actually links to You Tube videos. They are chosen by Peapod Labs and checked to be interesting and safe for kids. Kids cannot link from this app into other You Tube content. This app is nicely done and the facts make it interesting for adults too!

Highly recommended!

ABC Wildlife - Peapod Labs LLC

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Prancing Dancing Lily

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Prancing Dancing Lily

FREE for a limited time – Prancing Dancing Lily, an interactive story about a cow who doesn’t quite fit into her herd in Wisconsin. Lily loves to dance so she decides to travel the world looking for a dance that fits her perfectly. She eventually returns home and inspires her herd to dance in a conga line. Lily becomes the next lead bell cow – following in the hoofsteps of her Grandmoo and Mamoo. Very cute story!

Prancing Dancing Lily - Fat Red Couch, Inc.

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Easy Studio – Animate with Shapes!

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Easy Studio

FREE today – Easy Studio – Animate with Shapes, an educational app that teaches kids how to animate! This app uses geometric shapes to explain and to teach kids about animation. The app has two levels – “easy” mode and “expert” mode. The “easy” mode starts with a step-by-step tutorial. There are 5 additional levels that contain predefined patterns to guide kids through the animation process. The “expert”mode also has a variety of shapes and pre-defined templates but there is no longer guidance provided. Older students will be able to create more sophisticated animations in this mode using their own imaginations. The app contains a library to store, view and edit saved animations. The library also has 4 examples of completed animations – very cool. The app can be set for 11 different languages: English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Korean. What a GREAT app for the kids 6 and older – hours of creative fun await them!!

Easy Studio - Animate with Shapes! - Les Trois Elles Interactive

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Gappy’s First Words

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gappy

Spinlight Studio is celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas by giving away an app each day! Thank you, Spinlight Studio. Today’s FREE educational app is Gappy’s First Words. This educational app has beginning readers constructing 200+ three-letter words – 174 of the words following the cvc pattern. There are also 37 three-letter sight words included. Kids start with basic letter and sound identification then progress to making words. As they work through the app, kids earn parts to redesign Gappy’s house – with over 700 possible combinations. Parents can disable the music, change letters from upper case to lower case, and control the number of word lists used in the settings. I like that the app varies which letters (beginning, middle, end) of the words are missing in the easy levels. In the medium level, two letters are missing and in the hard level, all letters are missing. Kids are gradually learning to spell – nicely done for little readers. 🙂

Download link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gappys-first-words/id614840334?mt=8&uo=4

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Christmas Carols for Kids, Sing Along Songs – Jolly Jingle

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jolly time

FREE again – Christmas Carols for Kids, Sing Along Songs – Jolly Jingle, a super cute Christmas app. The app includes 5 animated songs: ♪ Jingle Bells, ♪ Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, ♪ Frosty the Snowman, ♪ Up on the Housetop, and ♪ We Wish You a Merry Christmas. It opens up to a snow globe which has 5 different scenes to represent the songs within the app. Lyrics can be turned on or off. Songs can be enjoyed 4 different ways: as an instrumental, as a piano solo, or sung by a female soloist or by children. Each song also includes fun interactive surprises – a very cute, MUST-have for the holidays!

Christmas Carols for Kids, Sing Along Songs - Jolly Jingle - Hompimplay

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The Night Before Christmas

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Night Before

FREE for a limited time – The Night Before Christmas presented by 100 Robots. The Night Before Christmas was written by Cement Clark Moore in 1822 and it has become one of the most popular pieces of Christmas literature. Christmas would not be complete without a reading of this classic. This educational app is beautifully illustrated by Bill Ledger and the animations are enchanting. The quality of the graphics is amazing – kids will be delighted when Santa stuffs himself down the chimney and arrives inside all covered with soot! Check out this delightful rendition of a holiday classic!

Teachers – It would be fun to compare and contrast this contemporary version of the story with a more traditional version. 🙂

Download link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/night-before-christmas-presented/id405581736?mt=8&uo=4

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YodelOh™ Math Mountain

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Yodel

Spinlight Studio is celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas by giving away an app each day! Thank you, Spinlight Studio. Today’s FREE educational app is YodelOh™ Math Mountain. Kids will have fun learning basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division math tables with this game. The object of the game is to score enough points to keep Hans from falling off the cliff. In order to do so, kids have to answer problems quickly and avoid the crazy charging sheep. And as kids score points, the questions get harder. The app also includes high-score charts that track the best 15 games for all 5 modes. I especially like the mode which permits kids to practice all 4 operations at a time. It makes kids pay attention to operation signs and quickly switch their thinking. What a fun way for kids to practice facts and it meets CCSS! Get it today. 🙂

Common Core State Standards met:

  • 1.OA.6 – Add and subtract within 20, demonstrating fluency for addition and subtraction within 10.
  • 2.OA.2 – Fluently add and subtract within 20 using mental strategies. By end of Grade 2, know from memory all sums of two one-digit numbers.
  • 3.OA.7 – Fluently multiply and divide within 100, using strategies such as the relationship between multiplication and division or properties of operations. By the end of Grade 3, know from memory all products of two one-digit numbers.

Download math: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yodeloh-math-mountain/id634946225?mt=8&uo=4

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Drawing with Carl

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drawing carl

Do you have a child who LOVES to draw? FREE today – Drawing with Carl is a fantastic drawing app for kids. This educational app is very intuitive and easy to use. Kids create pictures using 8 kinds of tools – pencils, crayons, paint brushes, markers, paint tubes, rollers, stampers, erasers, and stickers. The sticker tool is particularly fun. It includes stickers of Carl and his friends, backgrounds (which includes access to your photos), facial features, the alphabet, dinosaurs, mustaches, and assorted shapes. Kids can create and play with talking stickers that repeat anything they say in a funny voice! How fun is that?? Draw a monster and add a talking mouth, import a picture and add a talking mouth, etc. The app also includes 14 colors with and the option to create new colors. Works of art can be shared – save them as photos, email them, or posted them to FB. It’s no wonder that this app has been featured by Apple. Hours of creative fun await your kids!!

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Swapsies Occupations

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Swapsies

FREE today – Swapsies Occupations, a cute educational app for toddlers. The app features 10 community helpers – baker, pilot, mail carrier, doctor, police officer, firefighter, builder, astronaut, engineer, and rancher. There are two different modes: a dress-up game and an interactive quiz. In the dress-up game mode, kids mix-and-match hats, tops, & bottoms to find the correct combination. Once the clothes are properly matched, a fun activity is unlocked for each occupation. The quiz mode is age-appropriate. Kids are asked to make connections, reason, and classify – find 3 things that fly, find 2 things that are round, find 5 things a baker uses, etc. Additional information is available in the parents’ section where you can download the Swapsies Occupations App Guide. This app was featured in Apple’s Apps for Preschool and Kindergarten. It’s also a Parents Choice Award winner. Nicely done!!

Download link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/swapsies-occupations/id416577459?mt=8&uo=4

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Toca Kitchen

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toca kitchen

FREE for a limited time – Toca Kitchen, another fun educational app from Toca Boca. Kids take to the kitchen to cook for four lovable characters. In the frig they will find 12 different foods that they can prepare 180 different ways. They can slice, blend, boil, fry, microwave, and/or mix the foods together. They can also add seasoning to the food; but they need to be careful not to add too much. Once the food is prepared they plate it up, serve it to the character, and wait for a reaction. Kids will learn which foods each character prefers in a fun creative way. I love the questions and conversations that Toca Boca apps inspire. It’s no wonder that this app was a Gold Winner of the Parent’s Choice Awards in 2012.

Teachers – use this app to inspire creative writing. Write stories or poems about being a cook and the preferences of your consumers. Or, you could have kids compare and contrast the food preferences of the different characters on a graphic organizer. This app also inspires conversation about healthy eating. There are lots of possibilities for learning while having fun!

Download link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toca-kitchen/id476553281?mt=8&uo=4