12 Great Apps for Beginning Readers

1.   Rhyme to Read ($5.99)

This great app for beginning readers uses stories to build reading fluency.  Each book uses familiar characters from the previous stories to help build confidence and consistency. There is a free trial version available for you to check out.  You can find it HERE.

2.  Alphabytes ($3.99)

Students practice letter formation, letter sounds, more with this great app.  This is great for kiddos who need hands on work during tech time.

3.  Starfall ABC's (FREE)

This is a great app for practicing letters and sounds.

4.  Reading Magic (FREE)

Students can touch each letter to hear the sound for each picture.  This is a great way to work on short vowel sounds and CVC words.

5.  Phonic Phil (.99)

Phil is a robot who combines beginning consonants or blends with a word chunk.  Students can build real and nonsense words.  Combine this app with a printable recording sheets and you have an instant, easy station.  

6.  QuikTap Words (.99)

This app is great for quick sight word recognition.  While it isn't fancy like other apps, it gets the job done.  Kids love working quickly to find the sight word.

7.  Toby (.99)

This is an iPhone app but works well on the iPad. It isn't fancy but students must find the sounds in certain parts of a word.  

8.  Starfall Learn to Read (2.99)

A step up from Starfall ABC, this app works on chunks, word families, long/short vowels, and other skills.  It includes the same popular songs and jingles that kids love from the Starfall website.

9.  Fill the Gap (Free)

Students can choose different words lengths and combine that with different skills like missing ending sounds, vowels, vowels teams and more.  This app covers a lot of skills and can be used quite a bit before a student grows out of it.

10.  Sight Words Free (Free)

Students can read or spell the sight words.  They are organized by grade level.  There is a paid version of this app that keeps track of learned words.  

11.  Play Sight Words (Free)

Students can unscramble, read, play memory, bingo, or find the words.  It's a pretty easy app to use and this free version has quite a few options to keep kids learning. 

12. Mrs. Owl's Learning Tree A-Z ($1.99)

This is a fun app with a lot of different learning activities.  Great graphics make it even more appealing to students.
If you know of any other great apps, leave a comment and let us know!  We'd love to review them in a post!

Five for Friday {January 8th}

We are linking up this week with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday.  Click HERE to go check out the other Five for Friday posts!

Stephanie has been sending home her math facts fluency home with her Kindergarten students this week.  They are so excited to be "big" kids working on homework.  

You can grab up her facts packet by clicking HERE.

I am trying out alternative seating in my classroom.  I am starting with just a few tables at different heights to start with.  It has been a huge hit with the students so far!  I still need to find some stools, rugs and more seating options.

I am loving these Touchtronic letters that go with the app.  The kiddos are so engaged when they are using them.  I got them off of Zulilly so be on the lookout for them to come back!

Stephanie's students have been reading "The Mitten" and "The Hat" by Jan Brett this week.  The students wrote a thank you note to Baba from Nikki, the two characters from the mitten.

Then they journaled about a hat that they have at home.  They had to write using descriptive words and draw an illustration.

 

We are starting to use the six-traits for writing in our classrooms.  Our corporation is using Smekens  to roll these out.  If you ever get a chance to go to a Smekens education conference you should jump on it!  My students are loving rolling out the traits!

Here is Stephanie's Six-Trait board.

We hope you have a great week!

Techie Tuesday: Face Fusion App

This was a super fun activity for the first week of school and was a great getting to know you activity.  We had so much fun switching in/out faces all day and fusing them together using the app FaceFusion.

Students got to know each other by using questions to compare themselves.  I had set questions that I used and asked the students as a group while they all worked with their partner.  For the questions about pets and siblings, we didn't compare numbers... just if they had a brother/sister or dog/cat/fish etc.

You can download these pages (the questions and chart) for free by clicking HERE.

After students compared themselves to their partner, we used the app to fuse their faces together.  The kids caught on to the app pretty quickly... using the camera and aligning the facial features.
Here is a sample

Other ways to use this app:
~Fuse classmates together to make new characters for a narrative.  Talk about the character traits of the students and how combining them together would make a brand new character.
~Fuse two students together and make it a guessing game.  Have students give clues so that others can figure out who the fused faces belong to.


App Tips:
*Make sure to align the arrows around the face.  This seems to be the most important part of making the faces line up correctly.
*The face you choose first is the "base face" so it is the most prominent in the image... it is also the one whose hair is used in the swap.  Keep that in mind when you fuse the faces of boys/girls... if you have a boy who might be embarrassed with having "girl hair" you will want to make sure you place the boy picture in first.

Once we got done comparing we used the apps to fuse the faces together.  After a couple of demonstrations, the kids picked up on it pretty quickly.  You can share the pictures several different ways after you fuse them together (e-mail, camera roll, and social media).  You can share it as only the fused face or it will show the originals next to the fused face.  

Lite Version (Free):  Lots of ads and videos every couple of time you use it.  None of the ads were inappropriate that I saw but they were a little tricky to get past with exit buttons in different places and different wait times for videos.  Plus, with the lite version you can only access the last couple of photos that you took.

Paid Version ($1.99):  With the paid version, you avoid all the ads.  Also, you can load the faces of your entire class and keep switching them in and out... making multiple face fusions.