Five Favorites: Educational Apps

 I'm not getting paid for any of this, but you can repay me by telling me your favorite educational apps in the comments!

 1.  Dragon Box  This is a game about why math is fascinating.  It's a puzzle game that teaches algebra.  Unlike a lot of the math games which reward you for doing math by letting you progress in the game, here algebra is the game, and it is seriously addictive!

I got the family pack, which was good because the younger kids finished the "5+" game and wanted to start the "12+" immediately!

 We all got sucked into this one, from Oob to Mom.  You start out with symbols like in the picture above.  The box wants to be alone!

You end up doing things like the picture to the right.  The box is hiding as an X, but it still wants to be alone.  Every few puzzles, the creature in the box grows a little bit. 

The family pack also included "Elements," a separate game that does geometry puzzles that teach you Euclidian proofs! (So I'm cheating, the first pick was three apps... but I hope this company makes a lot more games!)

2. Stack the States  (and Stack the Countries) And the second pick is two apps.

But so fun!  You answer question about states (or countries).  If you get the question right, you stack the correct state into a pile passing a particular line.  If you pass the line you "win" a random state.  Winning enough states unlocks other mini games. 

We mostly finished this a year ago, but when places come up in the news, Choclo and Oob tend to remark, "I have that state/country!" 

I found the states fun and the countries surprisingly challenging!  With both games you can select the kinds of questions you are asked which makes it usable for a wide range of ages.

 3. Presidents Vs. Aliens  Made by the same people as Stack the States, you answer questions about presidents.  Correct answers give you a president to aim at the aliens - you win by clearing all the alien invasion.  And you win presidents and unlock mini games.

Very fun, plus Oob really shocked an adult by knowing all about James K. Polk.

4. Letter Quest.  This is basically Bookworm as an app.  You build words to defeat bad guys and progress on your quest.  You can play the whole thing free, but we used it enough that I bought it. Great way to learn spelling.

5. Hungry Fish Very simple fun way to build number sense.  Your fish is hungry.  You feed it numbers that add up to the number on the fish.  You can pull numbers together to create larger numbers and, as you progress in the game, the numbers your fish wants get larger and larger.  I believe this game can be expanded to subtraction as well.

I got this for my youngest kids, but found that older kids who had a weaker number sense were drawn to it as well (at higher levels).  It seems to me that it's possible to progress in math without a good number sense (I know I did), but it does not seem possible to enjoy math without number sense.

And now you know why my phone runs out of batteries!  Please tell me your finds in the comments

Crazy Day

The emperor is out of state on a visit to a friend. He's actually only gone for a night and a day, but he is very much missed. In the interest of lightening the mood, we declared today to be Crazy Day.

The kids wore crazy clothes.

Oob isn't in that picture because he had found the bowl for the strawberry shortcakes in the kitchen.

No, he's not smiling; bowl licking is serious business!


Those strawberry shortcakes were the dessert we had for breakfast.


We also had dinner for lunch (dinosaur chicken nuggets, that's actually a pretty crazy concept by itself) and we'll have breakfast (pancakes) for dinner.


















We then moved on to foot painting (instead of finger painting). Four 30' rolls of paper later, we had 120 feet of foot paintings! And very messy feet.

And we made chocolate chip cookies - they were crazy good!

The crazies got derailed for a while when we discovered that a new Book Worm Adventure had come out! Yeah, it is $20, but we've probably spent 50 hours on the last Book Worm Adventure (sample it here for free), and certain Zoomlians with serious spelling issues have improved dramatically...

In a little while we'll make finger people!

Favorite Educational Websites Round 1

I realize I've been referring to these and haven't introduced them. We do use a lot of web based resources, some free, some not.

Enchanted Learning: One of my favorites! Worksheets, crafts, projects and web based fun educational stuff for preschool through older elementary. Great for themes. You could easily home school just from this site for preschool through 3rd or 4th grade. Some stuff is free, but it is worth the $20 a year to have access to the easier printing/no ads/better sizes.

Learning Pages: This is free but you have to sign up (and they've never sent me spam). The ultimate in themes for Pre K through grade 3, arranged by topic, grade, and class (language arts, math and science). Extras include fact files, lesson plans, murals and cut outs. They also offer printable books, monthly themed worksheets and more. I think they actually have other stuff if you pay them money, but I've never tried it.

Brain Pop: Great funny highly educational movies on any topic you can imagine with other educational bonuses (quizzes, work sheets, and activities). Very expensive! I think it's something like $75 a year, possibly more, but you can get a 14 day free trial to see if it is worth it for you. The one caveat I have for this site is that I can't let my younger kids loose on it. Some of the topics (like reproduction) are topics I want to introduce to them, some are just aimed at older kids (like AIDS), and some of the novels (like Frankenstein) are books I want them to read before they see a discussion of them. I also have found their discussion of controversial topics to be fairly left leaning, their movie on stem cells was disingenuous at best (some people object to using embryonic stem cells because they could become embryos?). Still worth it to me with supervision.