Happy App Friday
Play store with printable grocery store items with “Little Zebra Shopper,” then sharpen mental math skills with “Equal: A Game About Numbers.” Plus, why reading aloud is beneficial for more than just young kids.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Little Zebra Shopper
by hans-peter
I hadn’t seen this app before, but it is a great idea. Little Zebra Shopper is a cash register app with a built in scanner for play grocery store items. You download the items from their website, print them on card stock, and then cut them out and glue them together, ending up with physical items to play with that also interact with the app. There’s a wide variety of fun items to download, including milk, pasta, pet food, pies, and even stickers you can attach to anything. With all their items assembled, kids can use the app to play store by scanning the items with the device camera and even making store announcements via the microphone. The in-app purchases version lets you try the app with a small number of items, and unlock item sets with purchase, whereas the full version comes with everything unlocked.
Fully Unlocked Version
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/little-zebra-shopper-gold/id717628346
Equal: A Game About Numbers
by particlemade
Although not targeted as an educational app (and without parental gates on links to sharing on Facebook), Equal focuses on adding and subtracting groups of numbers to solve puzzles. Equal presents a grid of numbers with the object of combing (adding) numbers together until there are two numbers left with the same value. The numbers tend to be small (10 or less) so the math can be done mentally. It’s more fun than it sounds, and it can get challenging when there are larger sets of numbers. Worth a look for a bit of math practice without the obvious math drills.
Why Reading Aloud to Middle Schools Students Works
We tend to stop reading to our kids as they get older, but read-alongs in school seem to have real benefits.
https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-reading-aloud-middle-school-students-works
