iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

elementary school

Sentence Builder for iPad Helps Students Learn to Write

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Screen Shot 2013-01-06 at 8.18.08 AM Sentence Builder from Abitalk is a series of iPad apps designed to help elementary school students learn to construct sentences. The app asks students to build sentences about the pictures that they see in the app. Each picture is accompanied by a set of words that students drag and drop into place to write the sentence that they hear read by the narrator. For example, in one picture children will see two people running and they will have to write the sentence that they hear the narrator read. Sentence Builder will tell students if they have written the sentence correctly or not.

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Sentence Builder allows parents and teachers to create their own lessons. To create a lesson start by selecting a picture from your iPad’s camera roll then write out the sentence that you want students to create. You can use your own voice to narrate the sentence or use the app’s native voice for narration.

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Sentence Builder Free is a free app for Kindergarten through grade 2. The full version of Sentence Builder costs $2.99. The full version offers more pre-made sentences, more complex sentences, and more word choices.

Moody Monster Manor Helps Kids Recognize Emotions

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moody_monsterMoody Monster Manor is a free iPad app that is designed to help children learn to recognize emotions. Moody Monster Manor features twenty cartoon monsters that represent emotions that children commonly experience. Some of the Moody Monsters that children will meet in the manor include Ecstatic Ed, Worried Wanda, Sad Sal, and Sorry Simon. Children can also create their own Moody Monsters to represent how they’re feeling.

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After meeting all of the monsters in Moody Monster Manor children can help the monsters deal with their emotions in four fun games (more games are in development). Children can help Hungry Hank make a snack, help Worried Wanda with her homework, and help Confused Carl match name tags to monsters. My favorite of the games is helping Scared Sam capture bad dreams so that he can get to sleep. To help Scared Sam capture the bad dreams students have to move their iPads left and right to shine a virtual flashlight on the bad dreams.

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Moody Monster Manor could be a great app to help children recognize emotions that they feel or that they see in others. Moody Monster Manor is an app that I learned about from Rod Berger during one of our Core of Education vodcasts.

Go Go Games – iPad Games to Practice Pattern Identification

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gogo_gamesGo Go Games is a set of iPad games designed to help children that have Autism Spectrum Disorders practice recognizing the features and patterns of objects. While these games were designed for students with Autism Spectrum Disorders any young child would enjoy them.

There are three games in the Go Go Games suite. The first game is Build a Train. In Build a Train students construct trains by dragging pieces together to match the model provided. The trains become progressively more difficult to build throughout six levels. In the second game, Wheels & Roads, students drag cars and trucks down a road according to the signs on the simple road map. The game is Out of This World. Out of This World asks students to build aliens and robots by matching the parts from a conveyor belt of parts to the model provided.

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Learn more about Go Go Games in the video below.

Go Go Games costs $1.99 USD.

Maily for iPad Gives Students a Safe Place to Learn to Email

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maily Maily is a free iPad app that provides young children with a safe and fun way to send emails to parents and selected family members. To use Maily parents have to create accounts for their children. Parents select and add contacts for their children. After the account is created children can then send and receive emails only from the people that their parents have added to their children’s contacts list.

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The user interface that children see in Maily is very kid-friendly. Using Maily children can draw pictures, use templates to create emails, and or upload pictures to send. To send an email children click the send button and the select the image of the person to they want to receive their messages.

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Maily could be great for introducing young children to email in a safe environment. You could have your students use the Maily app to have students send weekly emails to their parents about what they did in your classroom each week.

Pango – Interactive iPad Stories and Games for Kids

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pango_1Studio Pango produces a bunch of iPad apps that children (pre-K through grade 2) are sure to love. Some of the apps are free and some of the apps require purchase. To get a sense of what the paid apps offer, try the free apps first. This morning I tried two of the free apps. I tried Pango Book 1 and Pango Playground for Kids.

Pango Book 1 is an interactive story in which children help Pango ( little racoon-like character) take a bath, repair his house, play hide and seek, pick apples, and find hidden objects. When Pango takes a bath students scrub him with soap, rinse him off, and gather his bath toys for him. When Pango plays Hide and Seek students help him look behind and under objects. Students help Pango around the house by sawing boards, painting them, then nailing them together to build a birdhouse.

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In Pango Playground for Kids children arrange objects in a little virtual town. Kids can find hidden objects, make trains and cars move, and slide down slides. Pango Playground for Kids has one free level. Accessing the other levels requires purchasing the full app.