Tech Tuesday: Educational Apps by Punflay

Our family heavily uses electronics. We were that way before Blackberries or iPhones were even in the picture. When it comes to integrating technology into my daughter’s life, I prioritize based on the educational value of the activity she is participating in.

I was recently given the opportunity to test out two educational apps for the iPad by Punflay (no pun intended, I’m sure!). I found these apps to be a great educational resource for my 4 year old and they’ve officially been entered into our tech routines. If you don’t have an iPad, they also offer many other games for the iPhone, PC, Mac and have web-based games , too!

Measurement HD

This app is part of their Mathomatix series. It has an easy-to-use interface and my 4 year old, Kieran, was independent with it from the get go. It introduces basic concepts of measurement such as weight, volume and length in a fun environment.

Mathematical vocabulary and concepts such as "longer" or "fewer" is introduced

The app comes with five activities that each teach a measurement concept: Crazy Clock (time), Scale Tale (weight), Fill Me Up (volume), Long and Short (length) and Action Months (duration of time)

There is also a My Stuff section where kids can view the rewards that they’ve received after completing the activities.

Features

• Kid-friendly
• Easy-to-use menu for kids
• Simple activities that offer a lot of practice to reinforce concepts
• Supplements Math concepts learned in school
• Blends California and National Standards
• 5 games in one package
• Attractive graphics and exciting animations

Age level: Kindergarten and up

Price: $1.99

Word Wall HD

This app introduce your young readers to reading and writing skills through several fun and engaging games. There are six activities on the app: Writing ABC, Writing Words, See and Find, Hide a Word, Bubble Words and Jigsaw Words.

Word Wall helps early to beginning readers learn to read and write by:

• Hearing, visualizing, vocally repeating and writing down letters and words.
• Providing activities that cater to budding readers using multiple learning styles such as spatial, visual, tactile, language-oriented, logical, or rhythmic.
• Engaging kids with four well-designed reading games that reinforce recognition of age appropriate sight and word family words.
• Providing structured learning for ESL/EFL and special needs students to help develop or improve their reading and writing skills.

There is also a Word Wall is a wall that you can place “stickers” on (there are three different backgrounds to choose from and many stickers!

Features

• Kid-pleasing graphics and colorful interface
• Interesting and simple activities
• Over 75 sight words, and 12 word families with 65 word family words
• Reinforces early reading skills

Age level: 4 and up

Price: $0.99

From a parenting perpective, I love that I’m able to track her usage of the apps. If you log onto SmartTots, you get a graph of the total number of minutes spent each day on apps associated with SmartTots. It also gives you a pie chart of time spent within various educational realms (such as math, reading, etc). It would be great if this report also provided me with her accuracy in each game, but perhaps that’s in the works!

Here is a Video of both apps, in use:

Even though my daughter is younger than the recommended age, she was still able to participate and learn from the programs. My favorite game for Kieran is the Writing Words game. It works on word families and sounds out the entire word phonetically. This app does a great job reinforcing her early reading skills. She also enjoyed this game, especially the sentences they would read in the end, such as “The man ran to the can”. The associated cartoons made her laugh! I love that the Measurement HD app also uses vocabulary such as “more”, “fewer”, “shorter”, etc. to help reinforce her understanding of mathematics.

* We did not receive monetary compensation for this review. That’s IT Mommy received the iPad apps mentioned from Punflay free of charge to facilitate this review. This will in no way sway our opinion of the product or service.
 The review is in our own words and using information from their website and is our opinion. Your results and opinions may differ.