Happy App Friday!
Help your preschooler learn emotions with the aptly titled Plop Learns Emotions, and improve reading, vocabulary, spelling and language skills with Spell-Links WordUP. Plus, another reason to be mindful of what your kids are watching on YouTube.
Garry Froehlich
www.jellybeantunes.com
Plop Learns Emotions
by PlayCraft
Plop Learns Emotions offers several activities for preschool-aged children themed around learning emotions. Kids match situations to emotions, put together puzzles, stack boxes, and play a clever memory game that has them match different family members with the same emotion (rather than the same person/face). There are no words or narration, and while kids can play it by themselves, they may benefit more from playing with a parent who can help to describe the situations and emotions.
SPELL-Links WordUP!
by Learning By Design, Inc.
Given the price of this app was $21 to download, we could not test the app in advance for you. The app is made by an educational publisher of reading and writing curriculum. Here is their summary: This speech-to-print literacy app, created by the inventor of Earobics® software, is fun and effective for teaching, reviewing, and practicing word study skills to improve reading, spelling, vocabulary, and oral language. Choose an activity, adjust settings, and select words to support a student at the appropriate level. More activities are being released and once you purchase the app you’ll receive the new games for free. This clinical tool works offline. Several demo videos are available here so you can see SPELL-Links WordUP! in action with students.
More reasons to be mindful of what kids are watching on YouTube
The Washington Post reported that suicide tips are being inserted into YouTube videos for kids:
Needless to say, people will take advantage of a platform where anyone can upload anything. When my child was younger I found videos supposedly for children that would suddenly cut to screaming or horror movie scenes, so we screened everything first, and eventually got an app (like Cakey https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cakey/id906087656?mt=8) that let us pick which videos they could watch.
