Tech Ed 4 Kids

FLL Registration Hardship Grants

Karla — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:06:47 +0000

If your child is between the ages of 9 and 14 inclusive, FLL is a great thing to get involved in! Teams can be through a school, but also a parent or friend can coordinate a team. Registration is about to start!

1. National registration for Nature’s fury will open at Noon EST on May 6th. To register your team and get started, you can go to the official FLL registration website at gofll.usfirst.org. Please follow the steps presented on the website.

FIRST Lego League (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

2. FIRST has announced they will be offering Team Hardship Grants for the Nature’s Fury season. The grants are designed to aid teams that would otherwise be unable to participate in FLL without some assistance. If you are aware of a team that is beginning to form and may meet the criteria, please pass this information along to them. Anyone interested should contact your state coordinator.

Kindergarten.com Apps Free for the month of April!

Karla — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:30:31 +0000

Kindergarten.com’s philosophy:

iPhone ABA App (Photo credit: COG LOG LAB.)

At Kindergarten.com we are proud to offer you quality education apps exclusively available through itunes. All of our games are designed to work on Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Our apps have been specifically developed using an ABA approach to provide tools and strategies that encourage creative thinking and effective language building.

My little ones speech teacher recommended these apps and let me know about them. They are free this month!

One of my favorites is:

ABA What Rhymes? “Did you ever see a goose kissing a moose, down by the bay…” Rhyming is a basic component of phonics and very important pre-reading skill that prepares young children for spelling and decoding words. Teaching rhyming words in preschool and kindergarten sets a solid base for reading comprehension later on.

I’ve reviewed ABA Flash Card before and can recommend it. The apps fall into three categories: Flash Cards, Receptive Identification, and Problem Solving.

Technology can be an excellent learning tool for children with special needs! Children are drawn to it and this is another way to turn play into learning and make it fun!

Check out these great resources also if you are in need of help obtaining resources: http://www.autism-society.org/news/funding-for-ipads.html

Learning fractions can be fun?

Karla — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 02:30:53 +0000

Yes, learning fractions can be fun. Fractions Smart Pirate.

Fractions are a challenge for many kids! This is a math app that helps kids learn fractions with pirates. Play together with the pirates on four different islands and learn to read, compare and add decimals. There are four games in one. Each game is represented by an island.
On the first island we learn to read fractions. Work out how much pizza is available for the pirates in the boat after offering pizza to the pirates on the island. – Keep the pirates from having trouble.
On the second island, the pirates have to get across the bottomless abyss. In order to do it, they should balance the bridge using firecracker baskets. Help the pirates – choose a basket.
On the third island, the pirates come across an unexpected rival – One-eyed Captain. Make sure they get bigger watermelons than the Captain does. Compare the fractions and find which is biggest.
On the fourth island, one of your sweet tooth pirates wants to help himself to a few pieces of cake. Offer him these cakes and guess what part of the whole cake he takes. If you make a mistake, the pirate’s cake will be eaten by a parrot.

Features:
•Four games in one: simple fractions, equivalents, comparison and addition.
•Simple fractions with denominators from 2 to 12 are randomly generated.
•Fun animations of the pirate and his friends
•Prompts are given at the beginning of every level
•Three different levels of difficulty in each game: Easy, Medium and Hard

Funbrain

Karla — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 11:39:45 +0000

A friend shared FunBrain with me and I thought I should check it out!

I ended up stuck in one of the games that let you lift a blob monster into the air and drop him onto a teeter totter – launching his buddy into the air and hopefully into the tub of water that moved around. I wasn’t able to hit the puddle of water, and it kept moving, but it was addictive.

The site was really colorful and had lots of games. It was free though there were ‘hooks’ like the reading books were excerpts with links to buy the book on Amazon.

The book to the left was a book that looked like a chapter book that I could imagine my older kids having loved when they were in grade school.

There were also lots of great reading games (and math games) too. The games are fun and many are two people also. Check out Math Baseball! You can challenge your child to play you in Math Baseball and see who hits a home run.

There are also Madlibs for kids that like to make their own wacky stories, even one that centers around school.

I can’t wait to show this site to my youngest later. He’s just getting excited about reading and can do some basic addition and this looks like a site that will help practice those skills in a fun and colorful way. I love sites that are fun AND educational. FunBrain is one that I am bookmarking on our computer and can recommend to friends.

(For younger kids, my little one is still loving OwlieBoo. His favorite is to make the owls play)

Playing Games – Family Game Night

Karla — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:29:34 +0000

Last night we took a break from the computer and played Trouble. – Actually it was a modified version of Trouble since we are missing almost all the pieces. I thought it would be great to clear out the cabinets all all the unused games in our closet and wanted to see if each has all the pieces.

Fun Trouble (Photo credit: mkrill)

I love technology, it’s the majority of my time, but every so often it’s fun to take a break from all the screens. Since the rules were missing from our game, we used online though to find the rules. Turns out though Trouble was missing most of it’s pieces. I was all for throwing it out, but the boys had already gotten excited about playing. Our game had enough pieces for each of us to have two pieces so we went with that. Of course my little one

wanted four, so he used two red and two green. (I was green so half the game was trying to figure out which were mine and which were his). My middle son though informed me that games are more fun anyway when you ‘embellish’ the rules. We really did that! Everyone got in on the game and we were having so much fun that when the first person finished (the little one) – he just moved his pieces from the end back to home and kept going.

He finally needed to stop for his bath and bed, so we finally had to draw the line and end the game, bu

t it was a fun evening! Family fun night on the Wii or XBOX are fun too, but there is nothing like making up your own rules to a game that is made up of parts put together from half complete boxes in the closet.

As I went to throw out the game (really only about half the pieces were there), the middle one asked