Category: 1st Grade Language Arts

Felt Board

Felt Board is a great app for not only creating, but also story boarding as well. Students can create a scene with backgrounds and characters, save it as a picture, and then change it slightly and continue the process of saving each change as a new picture. They can then “app-smash” by inserting the saved pictures from their tablet’s camera roll into Book Creator and use those tools to finish their story. Younger students who are just getting started on their writing journey could take advantage of the voice recording feature in book creator to narrate their story that originated in the Felt Board app.

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Catchy Words

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Catchy Words is a great app that uses augmented reality to engage students in practicing spelling in a very interactive and multi-sensory way. Using an iPad, students can find letters that appear to be floating around the room and place them in the correct order to spell words. They can either access different words from a variety of lists already created and leveled, or they can add their own words that correspond to their own weekly spelling list, word study, or thematic unit.

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Educreations

Educreations is an app and a site. We already have the app available on iPads so there is no need to create an account. However, if you end up wanting to use this resource often, we can create an account where you can keep track of your projects. Educreations is similar to Explain Everything and other platforms that let you create “how-to”s, presentations, etc…, though its simplicity and clean interface make it a great option for younger grades as well.

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Rewordify

Rewordify is a great option for differentiating reading content so that different students get the same information while being delivered at their level. It is completely free and there are different avenues for use depending on what you are looking for. If you create a free account, you can take advantage of the more advanced features, but even just visiting the site allows you to plug in text and have it convert it to an easier reading level. For this reason, it can be as useful to younger students as it can older students.

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Osmo Words

Words is yet another learning tool that utilizes the Osmo devices. There are sets that can be checked out from the library (enough for a half group). They are a great way to Screen Shot 2018-08-23 at 6.22.19 PMreinforce spelling and phonetic patterns to help complement any existing word building program.

Apple CLIPS

CLIPS is a relatively new app (also a site) that was released late last year. It is a FANTASTIC alternative to iMovie, especially for our lower school students as it allows for an engaging, visual project but can be condensed into a one-off lesson. It is simple in its layout and can be used in a variety of ways. From narrating and animating a story or poem, to labeling parts of the ecosystem, to breaking down the cause and effect of a moment in history, it is all very easy and engaging for our students. It can also be a powerful tool for our youngest learners because of its ability to show the words you speak in “real time”. The possibilities for students to be able to narrate and illustrate their own books with words that fly out on the screen in any style they choose is really exciting. Clips is available on all school iPads (including the Library if students would like to check one out for a project).

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Check out a student-created example below!

 

 

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Wet Dry Try

Wet-Dry-Try is the app that specifically goes with “Handwriting Without Tears”, the program used to review proper letter formation in JK-2nd). It is pretty straightforward so although it is not as visually engaging as Letter School, its simplicity makes it advantageous for students who benefit from less distraction.

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Mystery Word Town

For readers who are just beyond CVC, this app involves the added lure of unlocking doors to work through mysteries, all while attacking words phonetically.
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MeeGenius

While this app only contains 800 titles as opposed to EPIC’s library of 30,000, until last year it had one very important feature that separated itself. With the read-alouds, the words that are read are highlighted along the way. This can have a “follow the bouncing ball” effect for the young reader who can now track in a way that helps them with pronunciation, diction, and fluency. However, EPIC just introduced this feature and has worked out any bugs so it now works seamlessly. That being said, the free version of MeeGenious is worth having on hand as it contains some different titles.
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Word Wizard

While there are a few apps out there that operate as movable digital letter tiles, this app has one feature that no other similar app has. You can import your own words so you can create different words to practice for different children. The voice is a bit animitronic and botches the pronunciation of some words, but the ability to plug in your own words (such as to match a current integrated unit) makes it a solid choice for word building.
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The Literacy Shed

The Literacy Shed has a free component that is still a wealth of resources for teaching English, even when you don’t use the paid version. It has videos, posters, printables, etc…
It also contains a great photo library for picture prompts, animation, story starters and more. There is a new feature, The Spelling Shed, that can be a great resource for students to complement any grade level spelling program currently used at different levels.
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Wonderopolis

Wonderopolis is a great site for students to explore independently, or as a class “warm-up” as it rotates a new thought-provoking question a day. There is a ton of information, videos, etc… on a huge range of topics.
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Biblionasium

Unlike Epic, Biblionasium does not have a catalog of the actual e-readers, however it is a fantastic digital bookshelf that manages student reading logs for you. The best part is, the students can recommend books to each other, you could recommend them to the whole class, or add titles to a specific student’s bookshelf.
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Book Creator: iPad

Book Creator has been a familiar resource for a few years now, but constant updates to the program have now really begun to unleash possibilities. The online platform allows our students to really tap into the ease with which they can create e-books and organize them on a digital bookshelf. It could even be a viable alternative to websites for housing and publishing their research projects.

Book Creator has also added a major update this Fall; the ability to embed content from

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Embed from other sites and apps with a click of a button!

other sites and applications!

Explore some samples of ways our students have used Book Creator below!
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EPIC

This resource, Epic, is a digital library of over 30,000 books, free to educators where students can keep a bookshelf of fiction and nonfiction. Excellent extra option for research resources, as well as for igniting an interest in pleasure reading. I am happy to set this up for you and your class if you are interested in using it.
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