Five Best Learning Apps For Pre-K and Kindergarten

Here’s the long awaited third installment of my 5 Best Apps series: Five Best Learning Apps for Pre-K & Kindergarten. You can find our first two installments here and here. While the first two installments focused on a just math or just writing, this list focuses on apps that include a variety of subject areas. In no particular order, here are our favorite apps for multi-subject learning:

Teach Me Toddler, Teach Me Kindergarten or any apps from the Teach Me series.

I’ve written about this app more than once, and it still remains a favorite among the children and the teachers!  They’ll often choose to play it over other apps.  One of the best features of this app is the ability to create a variety of accounts so that each student can have their own profile. It makes it perfect for use in a classroom setting. I review it here in more detail. It’s really worth checking out.

Timmy’s Pre-School Adventure  & Timmy’s Kindergarten Adventure

This app is a “journey” style app.  Timmy wanders through a variety of scenes that require him to complete a series of different tasks.  The children find this app very engaging. There is a free version to try out, but we like the paid version even better. The pre-school app teaches color matching, patterning,  shapes & counting.  It offers stickers as each task is completed. One drawback is that unlike the Teach Me apps, this app does not lend itself well to multiple users. Each child follows up on the work of the last. Still, this app is a favorite among the children.

PBS Parents Play and Learn

I set one student up to try out this app and within minutes, he was surrounded by a crowd of preschoolers, eager to try out these new games. The app teaches a variety of skills, including literacy, math and thinking skills. One of my favorite features of this app is the way that they provide follow-up off screen activities to go with the on-screen game that is a part of the app. They are leading the children to deeper learning, not just deeper into the app store, as is so often the case with online learning.  This is a great app for pre-schoolers and pre-kindergarten students.

JumpStart Preschool

My own children loved the Jump Start software we had installed on our computer when they were preschool and kindergarten age.  Now, JumpStart has moved into the iPad arena. One of my favorite things about JumpStart as a computer program was the way that my children were guided through a series of activities that became progressively harder until they had completed an entire group of tasks.  The set up is similar on the JumpStart app. Children complete activities to earn stars. However, again, while this works beautifully for an individual student, it does not work particularly well with a classroom full of students that may be sharing just a few iPads.  It covers the basic preschool skills, colors, shapes, letters and numbers.

Bugsy Pre-K

This is another great learning app for the classroom setting.  It has the capacity for a variety of individual student accounts so that each child can progress at his or her own pace. It covers a variety subject areas including colors, shapes, letters, phonics, numbers and counting, and it tracks mastery for each child. The children earn (digital) toys as they complete each task. I’m excited to check out some of the other apps from Peapod Labs. There are a number of them that look like they would fit well with our curriculum. The only downside to these apps is the price. At $3.00 per app, the price is a little higher than I’m usually willing to pay, particularly when I’m loading up a few iPads for classroom use. Still, the multi-user function is a key feature for a classroom set up and makes this app worth the price.

If you liked this installment of the 5 Best Apps series, be sure to visit the 3 other installments here.

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