The best iPad apps are colorful, engaging, allow independent learning, help kids when they’re stuck, and they gamify learning, so that there’s positive reinforcement whenever the kid is undoing well.
Whether you’re in a teaching role in kindergarten or whether you want to homeschool your little one, or simply give them a head start or a little extra help, you will find that there are some great iPad apps out there, just waiting for you to take full advantage of them.
In this article, I’ll be sharing with you my shortlist of the best iPad Apps out there for a range of subjects, but with a particular emphasis on reading and math.
Here goes!
(The following iPad apps aren’t listed in any particular order.)
As the name implies, this app focuses on phonics, the sounds of words and letters.
Eggy Phonics 1 concentrates on 100 short-vowel words, such as cat, dog and bus, while Eggy Phonics 2 tackles long vowels, and Eggy Phonics 3 tackles harder words.
The kids will see, hear, read, spell and write each word, thus reinforcing their learning and gaining a range of skills. It’s also very colorful and appealing to young kids.
Writing is one of the trickier things for young kids to learn, but this app makes it fun. It covers both numbers and letters, including both upper and lowercase letters.
It also covers tracing letter shapes, and even the option to add in some words, too. It’s very easy to customize, and it offers various difficulty levels, including easy, medium and hard.
This game is based in a “bug hotel” which happens to be an old refrigerator. Kids can tap the various bugs and count them to help them get across the water in an egg carton.
It covers not just counting but also comparisons, shapes, numbers, patterns, sequencing, and more.
This app is super fun! It will teach your kids to read, but the kids will simply feel like they’re playing games.
It covers things like matching letters and sounds, and there are 3 games onboard, namely first steps, fun with words, and champion reader. It compliments all of the synthetic phonics programs used in schools.
In this game, kids spell out words to fuel a spaceship before steering it through space to collect stars. There are 5 difficulty levels, determined by the number of letters ion each word, starting at 3 and going all the way up to 10 letters.
If needed, the kids can request audible and visual hints as they go.
Khan Academy covers a very wide range of subjects and skills. There’s math games, spelling activities, digital books, phonics, writing, catchy songs, yoga videos, and more.
It has an extensive library of lessons, and it can form a personalized learning path for each kid.
Smarty Ants offers an adaptive learning environment where students can build 67 phonics-based stories that can increase in complexity as they progress, and there are thousands of rewards to unlock for keeping the kids motivated.
And there’s also a handy teacher’s dashboard to keep a check on how each child is doing.
Young kids also need to learn about different emotions and how they can be expressed. It helps kids to be more sensitive and thoughtful, and discourages violence as expression.
It helps them to behave in accordance with what is the most appropriate reaction in different contexts.
This is a great app for developing awareness of sounds and how they are represented in letters and letter combinations. It’s also good for word recognition too.
It adapts to student performance for more targeted and personalized learning.
It provides real-time data on student performance and action plans for moving the students forward.
Wrap Up
Please don’t feel you have to pick just one of these apps to use. In fact, the broader the range of apps and subjects that the kids use, the better.
Yes, an emphasis on literacy and math is for the best, but anything that gets kids engaged in learning is a good thing.
Pay attention to the extent to which these apps keep the kids engaged, and which ones push the kids that bit more. And remember, the more kids associate fun with learning, the more they will enjoy learning through the years.
Hi, my name is Helena Waters and I was a teacher for 40 years before retiring last year.
During my time as a teacher I dedicated the majority of it to making classrooms as fun as possible, with educational parties, fun activities, and low cost entertainment that made the children excited about learning.
I taught children of all ages, from preschoolers to high school students. Now, with the pandemic having uprooted everything that children once knew about school and learning, I think that the need for my ideas is bigger than ever.
That is why I created School Sparks, a place in which I can write down and share all of my ideas on how to get students excited about going to school again. I hope that you’ll find some useful within a school setting, even at home too!
