“Eww! What is it?”

After spending the first few years of a child’s life telling them not to put unidentifiable things into their mouths, introducing new fruits and vegetables to a child can be a challenge for any parent.

The University of Illinois Extension service has an online activity, which can help with food AND letter recognition. Alphabet Fun, introduces a new vegetable with each letter of the alphabet, children can then color pictures of that vegetable, both online and off.

 While playing Dora’s Magic Garden, children plant virtual tomatoes, corn and silly flowers, then watch them grow as they water and add ‘magical dust’ to the plants. When the plants are grown, a picture of the garden can be printed for coloring offline. 

Buckleitner Message

APPS THAT PULL KIDS IN

We all know that the secret sauce to working with a child is to keep their hands busy, get them involved and keep them amazed. Here are three apps for the job.

•             ABC Farm, $2.99, by Peapod Labs is now bilingual, offering 210 (or so) clear photos of farm life, along with the ability to toggle between English and Spanish. 

•             The second, Mask Jumble Animals ($1.99, by Pi'ikea Street) turns your iPad or iPhone into a magical mirror, that pastes an animal mask over your face. Instantly, you see different ears, eyes, hair and other facial features, superimposed over your image.  It works like a charm for ages 4-8.

•             Finally, IBM Think, $free, by IBM Corp. turns your iPad into a hands-on museum designed to let you explore some big ideas -- stuff like how different kinds of maps have developed, the role of key inventions, and other big ideas.  This is the kind of app that is nice to have in your library, to increase the chance that a child might stumble across a big, culture-shifting idea. The app provides that big ideas can come with a low cost; in this case free.

Warren Buckleitner, PhD, Editor

Children's Technology Review

Learning to read is especially fun when technology is involved!  At www.starfall.com preschoolers and early readers can have a great time exploring letters and phonetics.  Games and activities are tied into each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, which helps children  grow their language skills!

Young children love to learn through song and story.  Visit www.thedripdrops.com to meet some fun-loving characters that bring colors to life via storybooks and activities.  The activities are also available on apps linked to the Drip Drop website.

APP TO CONSIDER

iStorybooks: Available for FREE on Android or Apple.

A collection of 25 free children’s story books with fun pictures, text and audio. iStoryBooks comes with free books that read itself to your child. They publish a new book every 2 weeks. Kids can enjoy these books on their own, or you can read to them.

Buckleitner Message - The Magic of the eBook.

I'm just back from Bologna Italy where I helped screen 243 eBooks, which we loosely thought of as "apps that tell stories." Among the entries were some incredible examples of innovation.

One that you should take a look at is War Horse ($14, Touch Press). The reason?   In many ways, this single app exemplifies how tablets will revolutionize how children will read, and learn in the future. War Horse is about the history of World War I in Europe- hardly a topic that is on the top of my reading list. But Touch Press has made is incredibly easy for even me to become a historical authority. First, they picked a great story, of a war told from the perspective of a horse. They also created a dynamic timeline, as you read, you scroll through the events in sequence.  The timeline is interactive, and something you can control. Included in the text are links to Google maps, marking the site of each battle. So you can zoom in to see that there is now a parking lot covering one of the battlefields. Not lost in this app -- the horror of this war. You get a close-up view of the weapons, and you see the war from both sides of the conflict. You learn how much misery this event caused- not just to people, but to horses. They say that history repeats itself.

If apps like War Horse can turn somebody like me into a historian, my hope is that it can do the same for millions of middle-schoolers.

Warren Buckleitner, PhD, Editor

Children's Technology Review