Category: JK 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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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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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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Fishy Paint

Fishy Paint is an app on JK iPads that allow students the chance to not just paint fish and put them into their own digital aquarium, but they can also record their voice overtop and change the movement of the swimming fish with the touch of their finger. They can even add a photo of their head onto a diver’s body so it looks like they are swimming in the aquarium!
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Letter School

Because you can adjust the settings in Letter School to “Handwriting Without Tears” (or other programs) it is a slightly better alternative to HWT’s own app, Wet Dry Try. It is recommended that beyond the first weeks of JK, students have to use a stylus to better reinforce pencil grip at the same time of letter formation.
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Starfall

This is both an app and a site that both contain a number of activities for both emergent readers who are practicing letter sounds, as well as for those of our youngest students who are already beginning their journey into reading. It is pretty basic, but has been popular for a while.
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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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Short Vowels

This app is a nice opportunity for JK and SK emergent readers to get a sense of word families, CVC combinations, rhyming patterns and more… There are other apps like it, but this has a nice interface that has been successful with many of our early readers.
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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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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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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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