Three Free iPad Apps for Fun Vocabulary Practice

Yesterday, I received an email from an elementary school teacher who was looking for some new-to-her vocabulary practice apps to put on her classroom set of iPads. The following were my suggestions.

Winning Words is a series of free iPad apps that feature matching / "memory" style vocabulary games. There are six apps in the series. Each app is played in the same manner of flipping a card and trying to find a match for it. The six apps are synonym match, antonym match, homophone match, compound match, double letter match, and singular/plural match. Each app supports up to four players and has three levels of difficulty.

Vocabulary Catcher is a series of six free apps. Each of the apps follows the same model. Students read and hear a word then have to "pop" the balloon containing the object that represents the word they heard. Students earn points based on their accuracy and their speed. Vocabulary Catcher 1 is about numbers, colors, and fruit. Vocabulary Catcher 2 is about animals. Vocabulary Catcher 3 is about toys and classroom objects. Vocabulary Catcher 4 features numbers and prices. Vocabulary Catcher 5 contains words about weather and seasons as well as more words about school facilities. And Vocabulary Catcher 6 contains words about clothing, sports, and sports equipment.

World’s Worst Pet is a free iPad app that contains a series of fun vocabulary games. In the app players have to help bring home Snargg, the world’s worst pet, who has run away. To get Snargg back players have to fill his food dish by learning new vocabulary words. Each of the six levels in the game contain ten dishes (each dish represents a new set of words) that can be filled. Four games are available for each dish. The games are fill-in-the-blank, synonym identification, antonym identification, and definition identification. World’s Worst Pet is designed for students in grades four through eight. The app contains a total of 1,000 vocabulary words.

Newsela's iPad App Offers News Stories Sorted by Reading Level

Newsela is a service that helps teachers find current events articles that are appropriate for their students' age and reading abilities. This week Newsela launched a free iPad app and iPhone app.

The Newsela iPad app and iPhone app delivers current news articles to students. The stories are matched to students' reading abilities. At the end of each article students can take quizzes to check their understanding of what they read. Should students find that the articles are too easy for them, they can quickly select a more challenging reading level.

Applications for Education
Newsela has an online classroom component that you can use to assign articles to your students' accounts. Beth Holland wrote a great overview of how to use Newsela in conjunction with Google Documents. You can read her article here.

Two Tools for Writing & Drawing Books Online Before Printing

This morning I received an email from a reader who was looking for tools that her students can use to create booklets that they design online then print. The caveat of the request was that the tools had to have an option for students to draw as well as type and insert pictures. A few tools fit that description. Those tools are Buncee and MyStoryBook.

On Buncee students can create a visual story that is unveiled as a viewer scroll across the page. Buncee stories can also be set to play automatically when they are viewed. Students create their Buncee stories by adding custom background templates to Buncee slides. To each template students can add animations, pictures, text, drawings, and videos. Buncee provides a large gallery of media that students can use in their stories. Additionally, students can import media from their computers, from YouTube, from Vimeo, from Dropbox, from SoundCloud, and from Gooru. Completed Buncee projects can be viewed online and or saved as PDFs.




MyStorybook is a nice online tool for creating short storybooks. MyStorybook provides blank pages on which you can type, draw, and place clipart. Your storybook pages can also include pictures that you upload. After signing into your MyStorybook account you can start creating your first book. Click on the text fields to edit any existing text in the title and author fields. You can add more text by clicking "text" in the editing menu. To add a picture of your own select "items" in the editing menu. At the bottom of the "items" menu you will find an option to upload your own images. MyStorybook provides lots of stock imagery that you can place on a page or use as the background to a page. If you want to branch-out beyond text and images, use the drawing tools on your pages.

Disclosure: Buncee is a client of MindRocket Media Group. I am a partner in MRMG. 

Google Books for Teachers and Students - A Guide

Google Books is one of my favorite research tools that students and teachers often overlook. In a post earlier today I embedded a book that I found through a Google Books search. Google Books allows you to do that with books that are in the public domain. I have done that a lot over the years when I wanted to share all or part of book with my students in an electronic format. Embedding books into blog posts is just one of many features of Google Books that teachers and students can use. In the slides and videos below I provide overviews of the other useful features of Google Books.

Lots of Lessons About Winter Weather

Conditions at my house on Tuesday.

A large winter storm is in the forecast for later this week in the northeastern United States. If you like snow, this is a great forecast for you. If you hate snow, the snow is still coming. I subscribe to the philosophy that you should make the most out of every season. That's why I love living in New England. One of the ways that we can make the most out of every season is to teach lessons related to each season of the year.

Scholastic has a large set of lesson plans and online activities for teaching about winter weather, winter sports, and winter traditions. Within Winter: Everything You Need you will find lesson plans on weather forecasting,  lessons on how animals adapt to winter, and ideas for teaching math through winter weather connections.

My favorite winter weather lesson resource from Scholastic is the Interactive Weather Maker. Using the Interactive Weather Maker students adjust temperatures and humidity levels to create rain and snow storms. Students simply move the temperature and humidity sliders until rain or snow begins to show up in the scene on their screens.

How windchill is calculated:
The windchill was -20F last night at my house. The following video explains how windchill is calculated. The video comes from Presh Talwalkar.



The psychology of extreme weather:
Television news reporters like to use the word "extreme" whenever we have a lot of rain or snow in a short amount of time. Is the weather really "extreme" or is that just our impression of it? The following Minute Earth video takes on the topic of how extreme weather affects our thinking about weather patterns in general. I found the video to be interesting from a psychology perspective. The video is embedded below.




How snowflakes are created:
The following episode of Bytesize Science embedded below explains how snowflakes are created.


Why the moon appears brighter in winter:
In the winter when we have fresh snow combined with a full moon I don't have to wear a headlamp to see my dogs in the yard at night. In the following Minute Physics video we learn why the full moon appears brighter in the winter.



Fun things to do in the snow:
NOVA, as part of their program on Denali, has directions for building a snow cave and directions for building an Igloo. (If you do either of these activities, make sure that you closely supervise students. A collapsed snow cave or Igloo can be very dangerous).

Boys' Life offers a list of outdoor winter games as well as directions for building igloos and snow shelters.

Making your own snowshoes is an activity that can be done indoors with the final product enjoyed outdoors. Mother Earth News offers directions for making your own snowshoes. How Cast has video directions for making an emergency pair of snowshoes.

In the video below BBC Survival Expert Ray Mears teaches viewers how to make an igloo and what igloos were traditionally used for.




When I was about seven or eight I was given a copy of The American Boy's Handy Book(Amazon link). That book is filled with fun hands-on indoor and outdoor activities including an entire section devoted to snow forts and other snow-related activities.