Vocabulary Skills Builder

Vocabulary Skills

Bluster!
Bluster helps students develop vocabulary skills while learning to recognize word patterns. In order to answer a question, students need to select three words from a list that share a common relationship. For example: locate three rhyming words, words with common prefixes or suffixes, synonyms, homophones, adjectives, or word roots. The passing parade of words becomes shorter each time a student selects a new trio. Adjust the Bluster settings to meet the instructional needs of students between second and fourth grade. Students can play the game alone, as a team member, or choose to take on a head to head competition.
Please post your experiences with these aps and any other aps that you have found useful.

Critical Thinking Apps

Critical Thinking Skills

Question Builder for the iPad
Mobile Education Tools make a wonderful series of apps meant to help elementary age children with special needs develop language skills. Question builder targets a child's ability to use inference to answer an abstract question. The questions come in five formats (what, how, why, where, and random) and function at three different levels of difficulty. Many users can share accounts within the same app and still receive a complete summary report. These reports detail performance in each question category and level. This app models how Bloom imagined inference operating at the "understanding" level. Question Builder is asking young children to carefully consider the explicit information given in an illustration and then predict the intended meaning. Every elementary student will benefit from developing this thinking skill.

Language Arts

Story Maker

Strip Designer
Ask students to retell the sequence of events in a Revolutionary War battle, folktale, science experiment, or the states of matter in the context of a graphic novel. Strip Designer can import maps, images from iPhoto, or photographs taken with a mobile device directly into a comic strip template. There is a wonderful selection of fonts, colors, text balloons, stickers, paper backgrounds, frames, and filters from which to pick. Students will need to choose a page template that best matches the number of events they plan to retell. With all these wonderful graphic features, it will be a challenge for students to explain events succinctly while sticking to the facts. When the graphic novels are complete, simply save the comics to iPhoto, print them out, or email as a JPEG, PNG, or PDF file. The app will also connect to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitpic. Retelling events in comic strip format is definitely a great way to build understanding skills and spice up a traditional paper and pencil report.

Math

Math
Math Puppy
Money
Math Ninja: Awesome for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. 
My math ap
Coin Math
Rocket Free Math

Motion Math HD
Learn fractions and decimals while tilting and turning the iPad. This app definitely wins the Fun Factor Award! Perfect for the kinesthetic and visual learner, Motion Math intermingles a variety of ways to recognize fractions. The graphic representations of the fractions alternate between numerator over denominator, pie charts, decimals, and percents. The goal of the game is to identify the correct answer by bouncing a flaming star at the correct point on a number line. Users need to constantly correlate a wide selection of fractions to a continually varying sequence of numbers. The diverse representation of fractions is a great way for children to make connections between separate areas of prior knowledge. With its constant translation of one symbolic form of a fraction to another, this app is prompting users to develop a deeper understanding of fractions. The app also responds to user performance and will automatically increase or decrease the level of difficulty.

Reference Apps

Reference Apps
ispell checker
dictionary
clock pro for stop watch (useful for DRA)
Common Core: Common Core Standards ap. Makes writing lesson objectives simple.
Brian Pop
Calculator
 Teacher Smart board for the Ipad
Educreations- Incredible app that lets the teachers record his/her voice as well as written text and have it play back and be accessed anywhere. You can also email the lesson or link it to your teacher web page.
ct to subjects found in the real world, and will also spark curiosity.

ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard
ShowMe is an interactive whiteboard that can record a screencast on the iPad. It will import photos or graphics from iPhoto, has simple drawing tools, an eraser, and voice recording. Having a tool that incorporates graphics with voice recordings provides a wonderful opportunity for students to translate material they have read. Consider asking students to narrate a map of a character's journey, create a timeline, sketch diagrams, animate a recording of the water cycle, or explain the results from a class poll. Teachers will need to create an account in order for users to save work to showme.com. Uploading content to this site will provide an embed code, and enable the ability to email the file or post it to Twitter or Facebook.

Seat Chart: Lets you take pictures of your students, place desks and windows and students and print them out. 

Study Apps

Study Apps
My Study Buddy: Lets you creat flashcards.

Grammar

Grammar
Contractions
Verbs Game

Assessments

Reading Assessment Ap
Reading Remedy: Assess rhyming, bending, sight words, fluency, word attack skills and makes teaching recommendations.


Easy Assessments: Input your classes, create rubrics, assess your students and run a report. Amazing app. It even lets you input notes on the student as well as video them with their assessment. You can also email the assessment to someone if you want.

Confer-The most informative assessment occurs when teachers have an opportunity to conference individually with a student. These are the precious moments when a teacher can listen attentively to a child explain how to do a math problem, engage in discussions with her about her writing, or hear her predictions about a book's outcome. Classroom teachers are constantly asking students to articulate what they are learning. The Confer app is useful for teacher documentation of these conversations. The mobility of this technology makes it easy to jot down quick, yet informative notes about an individual or small group of students. For example, teachers are able to list student learning strengths, enter a reading level, keep track of conference dates, and plan for the next teaching point. It is possible to export or import records through email and sort files by conference dates, groups, or tags. With a gmail account, data can upload as a spreadsheet. The juggling of a teacher's busy day just got a little bit easier.

Fluency

Fluency
 Read Me Stories: Reads stories to students. Colorful pictures and texts. Students can either read the stories or hear them read. They are RL 1-8 to 2.4. When the story is read, the words are highlighted when read.

Timed Reading: Is for students reading k-4. This ap has timed passages. This needs to be done with an instructor who can keep track of words being read wrong.

First Water: Beautiful picture story books. It will read to the student as well as can be set to have the students read the passages. Great work and picture correlation. IF the student doesn't know the word, the student can select the word and have it read back.

Young Reader: Speed Book e-reader; This is for advanced students to improve fluency to read more. The books are all classics. 

Blends

Blends
Reading Part 2: Magic Reading: blends, reading and segmenting.
Blend Seeker: Consonant blends (dr, fl, gr, gl ect.)

Sight Words

Sight Words
Word Bingo: Dolch words Grades k-3. Spell the words and play Dolch word Bingo.

Word Connect: Good for self contained ED classes. Identify patterns.
ABA-..belong: Has students identify pictures that do not fit the pattern.
Things Together: Students select items that go together.

Word Families: See and hear word families and trace them.

Sentence Building
Sentence Magic: Work with two and three letter words to make a sentence.

Vowel Sounds

Phonics' Vowels - Beginning letter sounds, rhyming, short and long vowel, magic e, vowel combinations  and alphabet matching. . Select the beginning letter to make a word that matches the picture.

Letter Sounds

Letter Sounds
ABC Go - Shows beautiful pictures that start with the letter sound. This site is good at building background knowledge.

ABC Pocket Phonics  Lite- Free but only does a few letters. It teaches you to write the letters and you also hear the sounds.

ABC Pocket Phonics- $2.99- Practices letter recognition and sounds, writing them and simple cvc words. Tracks students.

ABC Alphabet Book: Colorful picture book with a picture for every letter. Have the ap read to the student or the student can read the book and press any word to hear it when stuck. 

Preschool Island: Several games in one. Works on letter recognition, beginning letter sounds and simple CVC words. Also does numbers 1-12, simple, colorful wood, animal puzzles that work on perception.

Flashcards- Used to build background knowledge using colorful pictures. Good for pre-school.

Phonics' Vowels - Beginning letter sounds, rhyming, short and long vowel, magic e, vowel combinations  and alphabet matching. . Select the beginning letter to make a word that matches the picture.