iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

Phonics

Learn Vowel Sounds With These Clever Goats

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phonics_fun Clever Goats is an iPad app development company that has produced a handful of nice iPad apps designed to help students learn to read and write. Phonics Fun: Long and Short Vowel Sounds is one of the Clever Goats apps that I recently tried.

Phonics Fun: Long and Short Vowel Sounds asks students to trace letters, identify vowels within words, and then identify objects whose names contain short and long vowel sounds. A half-dozen activities is available for each vowel. Clear, narrated directions are provided to students as they work through the app. Feedback is provided to students at the completion of each activity screen.

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Phonics Fun: Long and Short Vowel Sounds is currently (April 28, 2014) available for free. The app usually costs $1.99.

Word Wizard Helps Students Sound-out and Spell New Words

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word_wizard Word Wizard is an iPad app that elementary school students can use to learn the sounds of the letters of the alphabet, sound-out words, and spell new words. The app has two primary modes to it. In the “Movable Alphabet” mode students can drag and drop letters on a board to try to create words. In Movable Alphabet mode each time a student touches a letter the narrator makes the sound of that letter. If a student combines letters, the narrator will make the sound of that letter combination. That pattern continues until a word has been created.

In Word Wizard’s Spelling Quiz mode students select a word list from the gallery of lists. After selecting a list students have to spell the words that the narrator reads to them. To help students spell each word each letter is pronounced while the student drags it onto the letter board.

Word Wizard offers four narrator voices to choose from. I found the “Tracy” voice with the US accent easiest to understand. There is also a “Rachel” voice with a UK accent, a “Tyler” voice with an Australian accent, and another US voice called “Heather.”

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Word Wizard is currently priced at $2.99.

Spellyfish – Fun Phonics iPad Apps

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spellyfish Spellyfish is a pair of iPad apps designed to help students learn phonics. Spellyfish Short A Words focuses on teaching students how to recognize and spell consonant-vowel-consonant words that contain the letter “A” and the short “A” sound. Spellyfish Short I Words teaches students to recognize and spell short consonant-vowel-consonant words containing the letter “I.”

Both of the Spellyfish apps work in the same way. After the initial set-up of the app (some students may need help from an adult for the set-up) students are presented with an interactive tutorial on the sounds they are going to practice recognizing throughout the app. After each tutorial students try out their new skills by spelling a series of short words. As they type each word the Spellyfish cartoon character pronounces the sounds that each letter makes. If a student spells a word correctly the Spellyfish sounds-out the word then pronounces it as a whole.

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The Spellyfish apps currently cost $0.99 USD. The apps support multiple user profiles.

Phonics Studio – A Great App for Learning to Pronounce Words

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Screen Shot 2013-09-18 at 8.51.26 AM Phonics Studio is a free iPad app that has received glowing reviews from speech-language pathologists. The app provides more than 2,500 flashcards that students can use to practice pronouncing more than 200 sounds. After opening the app students select a letter from the alphabet then a sound. Each sound has a collection of flashcards. To practice pronunciation students can listen to a recording and then create their own recordings (open the preferences panel to turn on the built-in recordings). The person working with a student can mark the student’s recording correct or incorrect.

Phonics Studio can be used by more than one student. The app supports creating multiple student profiles. The app also supports creating your own flashcards.

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Kids First Words With Phonics – A Nice App for Learning to Read and Spell

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Screen Shot 2013-01-27 at 10.31.33 PM Kids First Words With Phonics is a nice iPad app designed to help children learn to read and spell. The app shows students a picture, reads a word to them, then asks the child to drag and drop letter to spell the word they have just heard. The preference settings allow you to specify how many letters the longest words will have, whether or not a child will see hints, specify uppercase or lowercase letter display, and turn the narrator’s voice on or off. The preferences menu also lets you choose whether or not you want the narrator to speak the synthetic phonics of the words that children see in the app.

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Kids First Words With Phonics offers 27 animal pictures and names for free. An addition 45 pictures and words can be added to the app through an in-app purchase at a cost of $0.99 (USD).

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