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The Best Educational Apps for Kids in Reading and Math

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girl sitting on bed playing educational apps
Your child loves spending their free time playing mindless apps on their tablet. You yearn for them to continue enriching their academic skills after the school day ends. You can achieve both goals with the engaging, interactive, and educational apps detailed below. Start downloading!
Psst…Work on your kids’ planning and time management skills with How to Build Executive Functioning Skills With Homework.

Reading Apps

Ages 3 to 7
This colorful, engaging app helps kids develop their phonics, spelling, and sight word recognition skills through a series of games. With one game, kids use gold letters to form words; in another, they practice writing on a stone wall; and in a third game, they collect special gems to improve sight word recognition skills. Orton Gillingham concepts such as decoding words with blends, consonant digraphs, and vowel patterns are integrated into the app.
Ages 0-5
This app is a great once for reinforcing phonemic awareness and early reading skills. It includes interactive movies that integrate word patterns and 15 mini books that give kids practice reading. Children love the colorful games, songs, and pictures that are contained throughout the app.
Ages 3+
Dr. Seuss books have wonderful rhyming patterns that help build early language and reading skills. This app contains digital versions of Dr. Seuss books, broken down into the following categories: Bright and Early Books, Beginner Books, Big Books, and Short Stories. Vocabulary and decoding skills are further reinforced by allowing kids to tap on certain words to hear how they are properly pronounced.
(grades 3-12)
For all animal lovers, Chicktionary is a fun way to practice reading and spelling skills‎. Players are given seven letters that they must use to create different words. They earn points based on the length of their words and can play the games either timed or untimed.
Ages 4+
Epic contains one of the largest digital book libraries for kids! It offers over 35,000 books for children to choose from, including picture books, chapter books, graphic novels, audio books, and more. ‎Kids can even read books in Chinese or Spanish!
0-5
For preschoolers and kindergarten students, Reading Egg serves as a great way to build pre-reading skills. Kids develop phonemic awareness and early literacy skills through a series of fun games, videos, and guided lessons.

Math Apps

Ages 6-8
This is a great app for building foundational math skills for young learners. Kids play a series of games based on their age and skill levels and can collect awesome prizes at the end of each game. ‎ A special font for kids with dyslexia is included, and quizzes are integrated to help ensure concept mastery.
Ages 6-14
Many kids struggle to learn their basic math facts; Rocket Math helps kids become automatic with these key concepts.  This is a useful app for working on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts. Kids enjoy the spaceship world and interactive design that helps make the process of learning and practicing math facts loads of fun!
Ages 4-14
Some kids just need a little extra practice with math concepts that are presented in school. This app covers so many key math concepts that kids often struggle with, including but not limited to, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, place value, time, money, geometry, algebra, and so many more!
Ages 5-8
This app is based on Common Core Standards and helps youngsters practice mental math. Players try to obtain a high score by collecting marbles as they practice key math skills. Concepts such as sequencing, counting money, telling time, solving basic equations, and several other concepts are integrated.
Ages 4+
Many students struggle with number sense, a key skill for math success. With this app, kids can play six different games, with each one reinforcing a number sense concept. For instance, kids practice sequencing, counting, ordering numbers, and more.
Ages 0-5
For young learners, learning to recognize and write numbers is key for math foundation building! With this app, kids select a number from 1-20 and‎ trace the number, then watch a Sesame Street video that integrates that number, creating a useful multi-sensory experience. It certainly keeps kids engaged while they master number recognition skills.
Keep your child learning during time off school to continue enriching core academic skills. ‎These apps will help your child be well on their way to academic success!

About the Author

Emily Levy

Dr. Emily Levy is the founder of EBL Coaching, a tutoring program that specializes in one-on-one home and on-site instruction for students in grades preK-12 in NYC, NJ, and Westchester. She is also the author of Strategies for Study Success, a study skills workbooks series emphasizing test taking, note taking, reading comprehension, writing, and executive functioning strategies, and the Flags and Stars Orton Gillingham student workbook series. These books are currently used at schools nationwide. Dr. Levy studied at Brown University and later received her Masters Degree in Special Education and her Doctorate Degree in Education. She has spoken nationwide on research-based methods for teaching students with and without learning disabilities. Dr. Levy is currently the Director of EBL Coaching’s learning centers.

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