Erin is one bright button and that can be a challenge but these 16 education apps support her learning. She thrives at school and loves both the social side and the academic side. It is a cliche but she really is a little sponge soaking up all the knowledge she can.
As a parent, we have to make sure that Erin is challenged because she needs to continue to grow. She has an amazing mind and we want her to continue to enjoy learning.
Here I am sharing some of the best learning apps that Erin enjoys playing at home. We don’t prescribe when she doe these but they are there and it is part of her downtime at home.
Our Favourite Education Apps for KS1
1. Teach Your Monster To Read
This award-winning game focuses on teaching KS1-age kids phonics and reading skills. It covers the first two years of learning to read, from basic phonics all the way to enjoying little books.
Along the journey, kids that are playing the game can create a monster, and meet a huge number of colourful characters. It’s suitable for use at home, and pairs really well with all synthetic phonics school-based programs. There’s a web version that’s free, or the game is available as an app for £4.99.
2. Puppet Pals
This is a really great app for any kids that are particularly creative. In three steps, the app guides you through making an animation. Firstly, you choose characters and backdrops, then arrange them on the screen, and then press record. The app records speech and animation in real-time, and you’ve immediately made a little film!
There are plenty of recognizable pre-installed characters in this free app, but you can bring in your own drawings or photos too.
It’s a really simple process with powerful immediate feedback. This constant level of feedback encourages kids to experiment and keep creating, leading to more and more constructive play like this.
3. Hit The Button
Hit The Button is a paid app (it costs £2.99), which encourages kids to get into maths. The impressive thing is that it effectively ‘gamifies’ maths, while still teaching.
The app is aimed at five to eleven-year-olds, and it’s made up of a huge number of tests, which are dressed up as games. Some of the included topics are number bonds, times tables, doubling and halving, multiples, division facts, and square numbers.
The impressive thing about the app is its ability to make lower the confidence barrier of entry. Even kids who are less confident in their maths skills can and will enjoy this app for what it is: a fun string of games that happen to teach you things.
4. Busy Things
Busy Things is a company that boasts a whole suite of apps for kids of various ages. If you try out a few and find that you love them just as much as we do, then you can sign up for their monthly subscription service which gives you access to a load of great apps and sites.
However, our personal favourite app, Shape Up! Lite is absolutely free. The app is designed to help you trace a shape, use the paint bucket to fill it, and watch it animate and come alive.
These apps (and Shape Up in particular) can teach kids about letter formation, as well as help to build fine motor skills and give children and parents the language needed to talk about shapes and patterns.
5. Geocaching
Another family favourite is Geocaching. This is a great app for kids that are particularly active and would benefit from a little time spent outside the house.
At a basic level, Geocaching is a treasure hunt with technology. You download the app, and on it can see little stashes that are hidden in your local area.
Their general area is marked with a point on the map, which is too imprecise to find exactly. When you get close, you use the clue which someone else has left on the app to find the exact place of the item.
Then, you get close and can open the box. You’re encouraged to take something from the box, and leave something of your own, though that’s completely optional. It’s really popular the world over and provides gentle exercise while helping to develop kids’ problem-solving abilities.
6. Claro ScanPen
This is a great tool to help encourage kids to be fully independent readers. The makers of this app realized that while there are a whole host of tools to help kids read on computer screens, there are very few to help them out with reading passages in books.
The app, which costs £9.99, enables someone to take a photo of a passage of text in a book, and then it uses OCR (optical character recognition) to translate that image into usable text.
Then, you can highlight which part of the text you’d like help with, and a human quality voice will read it aloud. For a point of reference on the voice, it’s roughly the same quality as Siri or the Google Assistant on your phone.
7. Pockit
Overlook the odd spelling of ‘pocket’ for a second, this is actually a really helpful app! Pockit is a budgeting app aimed at kids between eight and eighteen.
The service allows you to buy a debit card for your child (at a cost of 99p), and preload it with money. It’s an easy way to dole out pocket money, rather than scrambling to find cash.
Cash withdrawals cost 99p per withdrawal, but buying goods online or in a shop is free. Children will get their own sort code, as well as an account number and pin code. They can also report a lost card via the app!
Finally, in this suite of impressive features, kids can also earn cashback at certain stores, including Pizza Express and New Look. This is a great app to help teach your child budgeting skills, with the inbuilt safety net of children not being able to go overdrawn.
8. Monster Physics
Aimed at children aged ten and up, the app costs £1.99 and is mostly based around design and technology, with a splash of physics knowledge thrown in. There are sixty-eight different components that kids can use, and they can create anything they set their minds to!
Once the invention is complete, Monster Physics uses its own physics engine to let kids operate their creations and see if it works. Alongside the fun, Meccano-like aspect of this game, children can become comfortable with concepts such as friction, force, and mass.
9. Flashsticks
This is a great app for older key stage one kids who might have trouble learning a second language at school. Fresh out of Birmingham Children’s Hospital School, this system allows kids to see, hear, say, and touch the word that they’re focussing on.
It’s a combination of a mobile appication, and a set of colour-coded post-it notes. The colour code depends on the language being spoken, as masculine nouns are written on blue paper, while feminine nouns are written on pink paper.
All other words are on green paper. If you point the app at one of the post-its, a native speaker will say the word aloud, helping with pronunciation. The app itself is free, while the post-it notes can be bought on Amazon for £5.99.
10. Forest
The Forest mobile app is really popular at the moment with so many kids learning from home. Designed to prevent the problem that a number of kids have where they feel the need to check their phones regularly, which distracts them from their work. The app works by generating a little tree when you start studying.
The tree then grows while the app is open, but as soon as the app is exited (say, to check Instagram), the tree dies. This app is particularly good for kids who love video games and relish a challenge, and it’s a cheap solution to a problem that just seems to be increasingly growing every day.
11. Where’s My Water?
This is a particularly great puzzle app, which is based around some basic physics to help teach your kids maths.
The game, which costs £1.49 and is ideal for KS1, combines a cute story with some simple physics-based puzzles. It’s a really engaging and helpful way to learn how to calculate fractions and percentages.
The design of the app is stunning, too, complete with vibrant graphics that leap off the screen at you, as well as intuitive colours and a sensational soundtrack.
12. Piiig Labs
Piiig Labs is perfect for young children with an interest in science. The app, which costs £1.99, is a science-based education app that leans hard on creativity and experimenting.
Children learn to use their logic and problem-solving skills in order to figure out how each project and experiment will work. Piiig Labs has eight activities in total, and a whole host of fun interactive images to play with.
The activities range from building a lightbulb to understanding how volcanoes work, and kids using the app are encouraged to learn through interaction and sometimes simple trial and error. Upon completion, the experiments come to life, and the kids can see just how their project either does or doesn’t work.
13. The Numberlys
This storybook application costs just £3.99 and features all the elements you’d usually find in a more traditional full-length animated film.
The inhabitants of the app live in a world which is populated only with numbers. While exploring this strange world through the app, you learn that every street sign, town, and person is a number.
The Numberlys challenge the status quo and aim to build the alphabet through a lengthy process of trial and error. Eventually, the experiments come to life, and the introduction of letters brings a mountain of color and fun to the world.
The app is incredibly captivating and really useful to help kids learn the alphabet. Teachers or parents can play along, hum, and sing.
14. Toca Builders
Following from the concept of Minescraft, the Toca Builders app is perfect for young kids.
The simple Toca Builders app makes it fun, educating and easy to drop, spray, smash, and lift blocks with the aim of constructing huge skyscrapers or craft impeccable tools.
During the course of the game, kids will be able to build whatever they like, wherever they like. They have the help of six robot builders, who all have unique crafting skills that they employ during the building process.
It’s great fun for any kid that has a passion for constructive toys, and it’s sure to have a positive impact on a child’s creativity. The app is available for £1.99, on both Apple and Android devices.
15. Green Eggs and Ham – Dr. Seuss
Another storybook for our list is this Dr. Seuss classic, which is done through a mobile app costing just £2.49. Children can use the app to add new words to their vocabulary while also further improving their literacy skills.
This new and improved version of the classic has a ‘record and share’ feature, which lets you record and save the narration of several different readers. This feature means that it could be particularly good for a set of siblings, who all want their own narration over the classic tale.
16. LearnEnglish Kids: Phonics Stories
There’s a huge gap in the market for kids who learn English as a second language, luckily this app has found and filled this gap in the market and better yet – it’s completely free!
The phonics-based interactive storybook app that features great audio narration and fun games. The story follows two super space spies: Sam and Pam.
They arrive on earth and then learn how to speak and spell English words. Learning alongside the characters, kids can develop their reading skills, learn new words, and build a foundation in early literacy.
