Language Adventures with Leo the Lobster and Friends

Building Language for Literacy offers three nice little language activities from Scholastic. The activities are designed for pre-K and Kindergarten students.

Leo Loves to Spell asks students to help a lobster named Leo identify the first letter of a series of spelling words arranged in a dozen categories. Reggie Love to Rhyme features a rhinoceros that needs help identifying the words that rhyme with objects found in places like the home, the garden, and the supermarket. Nina the Naming Newt needs help identifying the objects that belong in places like the home, the store, and the firehouse.

Applications for Education
The three activities found in Building Language for Literacy can be used individually by students or as part of a group lesson. According to Scholastic that the activities are optimized for use on interactive whiteboards.

I learned about these activities through Kelly Moore's Techie Kids blog.

Peep and the Big Wide World - Educational Games for Children

Peep and the Big Wide World is a nice resource for pre-K and early elementary school that I learned about through Kevin Jarrett's most recent Last Week in Lab post.

Peep and the Big Wide World, produced by WGBH, offers a great collection of online games, videos, and offline activities designed to help students learn and practice skills in math and science. One emphasis of the games that I tried is recognizing patterns. In all there are fifteen online games available through Peep and the Big Wide World.

The offline or Anywhere Activities section of Peep and the Big Wide World offers dozens of activities designed to extend the science and lessons provided in the Peep and the Big Wide World videos. In fact, when you're on the video page you will notice that there is a suggested Anywhere Activity listed with each video.

Applications for Education
Peep and the Big Wide World looks like it could be a great resource for pre-K and early elementary school science and mathematics lessons. Kevin Jarrett is one of the first people I started following when I started this blog and I've always found his work to be insightful and helpful. If he's using Peep and the Big Wide World, I'm inclined to think that it must be good.

Alphabetimals - A Fun Way to Learn the Alphabet

Alphabetimals is a nice website on which you will find some nice resources for helping young children learn the alphabet. The main feature of Alphabetimals is an interactive flipbook featuring animal sounds and the pronunciations of animal names.

The Alphabetimals characters can spell out any word that you would like. Just type in the word and it will be printed for you. You can then print out the Alphabetimaltized (yes, I just made up that term) version of the word. Alphabetimals also offers free printable flashcards, an alphabet poster, and alphabet coloring pages.

Alphabetimals is funded by sales of Alphabetimals products like posters and tee shirts. For every product purchased they donate a book to Books for Africa.

Applications for Education
Alphabetimals offers some nice little resources to help you help children learn the alphabet. For folks like me who are not artistically inclined, the option to type a word and print it in an alphabetimalized version could be a nice way to print and display vocabulary words in your elementary school classroom.

Alien Buddies - An iPad App for Learning Shapes, Numbers, Letters

Alien Buddies is an iPad and iPhone app designed for pre-k students to practice recognizing shapes, letters, and numbers. The app provides leveled games in which students practice recognizing patterns and sequences. The activities for recognizing letters and numbers have audio and visual prompting modes. Alien Buddies normally costs $1.99 but I received an email from the app's publisher informing me that it is available for free today, January 27th.