If you are familiar with McGuffey Readers, you know that they have been a trusted name in education, teaching more than 10 million children.

The Phonics and Reading with McGuffey App from LiteracySoft brings these lessons to life in an app, teaching your child to read with 52 step-by-step lessons. Phonics and Reading With McGuffey works on your PC, Mac, and Apple devices.

The Phonics and Reading with McGuffey App is carefully crafted to:
• Ensure no expert phonics supervisor is needed for students to gain maximum value from the lessons
• Work for any literacy level
• Act as your own personalized tutor, except in a computer
• Let students set their own pace, repeating or slowing down lessons as much as they like
• Guide your student step-by-step through reading and spelling practice
• Provide multi-sense learning including sound, vision, and motion to appeal to a wide variety of learning styles
• Utilize the power of synthetic phonics – the dyslexia-busting learning technique
• Be simple and easy to use for students at any level

The first 10 lessons of the PC version and the lite version of the app are available as well, to try out before you buy!

History is filled with interesting events and fascinating people, and Knowledge Quest offers unique ways to help students learn about and connect with history.

Sacagawea is a historical novel with a twist. It is an interactive ebook for kids ages 10 and up, with embedded links that readers can click in order to gain a deeper understanding of the life and times of one of America’s most honored women.

Written and released as 4 episodes, the complete Sacagawea story is now available in this ebook, beginning with Stolen!, and followed by Passage, Survival and Equal. Read a sample chapter, then the Complete Sacagawea Saga, now available on Amazon.com for $4.97.

KQ TimelineBuilder is an incredibly flexible and feature-packed iPad app for creating custom timelines. Child friendly (ages 10+), TimelineBuilder encourages learning about important events in science, history, art, and literature. You can choose beginning and ending dates, then add, edit, and delete events on your timeline. Use the Wiki button for convenient fact gathering. Make your timeline unique by manipulating the size and placement of images, and choosing different backgrounds. Not just for history buffs, TimelineBuilder can also be used to illustrate family trees or organize the steps of a project. Timelines are saved automatically. You can also share with your family and friends via your image library, email or iTunes.

You can see screenshots and a video tutorial on the KQ TimelineBuilder page, then purchase it from the iTunes app store for $6.99.

Mobile Educational Tools has offered two great apps for the Crew to review, Rainbow Sentences and StoryBuilder.

Rainbow Sentences, which is for the iPad only, is designed to help students improve their ability to construct grammatically correct sentences by using color coded visual cues. The who, what, where, and why parts of sentences are color coded to help students recognize and understand how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure.

StoryBuilder is an app that is specifically for the iPhone or 4th generation iTouch ( the ones with a camera). It is designed to help children accomplish the following goals: 1) Improve paragraph formation; 2) Improve integration of ideas; and 3) Improve higher level abstractions by inference. Through the use of extensive audio clips it promotes improved auditory processing for special needs children with autism spectrum disorders or sensory processing disorders.

Both of these apps are available for purchase in the Apple App store. Rainbow Sentences is available for $7.99, while StoryBuilder sells for $5.99.

A big thank you to Jacquelin of A Stable Beginning for writing this introductory post.

Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting is now offering a downloadable app available through iTunes.  Several of our reviewers recently had the chance to review Letters Make Words for the iPad.

This app is designed to teach handwriting with phonics.  Designed by a Handwriting Specialist and an Early Childhood Specialist, Letters Make Words proposes to help beginning writers develop good handwriting habits while learning basic phonemes. 

How it works:  The first screen asks the child/teacher to choose a letter to learn or practice.  A friendly female voice instructs the child to trace the letter patterns with his/her “writing finger”.  After successfully tracing the letter, the child is directed to trace a word on the next screen.  As the child is tracing, he is hearing the sounds of the selected letter.  The words traced will contain the sound of the letter traced on the previous screen.  After the child traces a single word, he is instructed to trace three words, and then he is given a sentence to copy with paper and pencil.

See what Crew members had to say about this app by clicking on the link below:

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

Thanks to Tara from This Sweet Life of Mine for writing this post.