10 Fantastic Free Android Apps for Kids

Last January I did a post on iOS Educational Apps, but now that I've crossed over the dark side - er, gone Android, I thought I would do another list. Besides that, a lot changes in a year in regards to apps.

These are our favourites and they are all free!

	Kids Video Player For Youtube
	This is a video player, with child lock,  made for kids and toddlers to watch vidoes on YouTube on your android devices. This app allows you to search video from YouTube using safety mode so inappropriate videos are not returned in search results. You can create a playlist of Kids YouTube videos in the app so that kids can only watch your approved videos on YouTube. UPDATE: Ya, not so good. The child lock you have to insinstall fornit to work is so jot worth the grief and pain it causes me! Scratch this app off the list.
	BrainPop Jr Movie of the Week
	The free BrainPOP Jr. Movie of the Week app delivers a different animated movie every week - plus related quizzes and educational activities. If you’ve already got a BrainPOP Jr. username and password, you can log in and access all BrainPOP Jr. content directly from the app at no additional cost.  Ideal for kids in Kindergarten through grade 3, the BrainPOP Jr. Movie of the Week app spans topics across Science, Social Studies, Reading, Writing, Math, Health, Arts, and Technology.
	AIO Audio Player
	This sweet app lets you listen to free episodes and podcasts from Focus on the Family's "Adventures in Odyssey" Radio Drama. It's very professionally done. You can find out more about Adventures in Odyssey  at http://www.whitsend.org.
	Superbook Bible, Video and Games
	Bring the Bible to life with this videos from the Emmy Nominated animated series, Superbook. There's also games and trivia. There are videos and interactive content embedded in the Bible, and profiles on people, places and artifacts found in the Bible.
	Bible for Kids
	New from You Version is this dandy Bible app for little ones. Interactive adventures and beautiful animations allow kids to explore the big stories of the Bible. It's easy to navigate and the fun facts and interactive animations keep kids engaged and help them remember what they learn.
	Duolingo
	The most fun way to learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, or English. Do quizzes, play games and earn shiny rewards for answering correctly.
	Madagascar Math Ops Free
	The Zoosters, Alex, Marty, Melman and Gloria, are in trouble, and it’s up to the Penguins to save the day! Skipper, Kowalski, Private, and Rico need your help as they embark on a wild mathematical covert operation to free their friends from the enemy agents!  The Penguins will use soda pop powered jetpacks in an aerial assault, in order to bust the Madagascar Zoosters out of their cages!
	10monkeys Multiplication
	This is a great app for practicing multiplication. You need to free the trapped monkeys using your multiplication skills, while mastering the multiplication tables from 2 - 10.
	LEGO® App4+
	For kids age 4-7 or just a playful spirit. Build your own truck (helicopter blades or legs for wheels optional), bring your cargo to its right destination, and collect coins to earn more parts.
	Stickman Soccer
	Fast paced action, smooth animations and simple controls make this soccer game a winner. Choose your favorite national soccer team from more than 32 different skilled teams and lead them to victory.

10 Online (+ App) Homeschool Lesson Planners

I've used a lesson planner, and then not, and now I want to again because I like to know if we are where we need to be, and have an idea when our year is going to end. Not that we finish everything all the time, but it's nice to know we're on track at Christmas. It's also nice to be able to generate reports for our support teacher.  So, I've been researching online and app lesson planners. There seems to be quite a few more than when I last looked three years ago.

I will start with the ones I've tried out first and then list a few more options afterwards. Some of them are even either entirely free or free to try!

The OLLY homeschool app is available for Mac and the iPad. This is the planner I decided to go with because of a couple key features: the ablility to generate lesson plans without having to type in every lesson for every resource in every course, and being able to 'bump' a lesson ahead to the next day and have the rest of the lessons in that lesson plan follow suit. They even automatically skip holidays that you've already created. 

It's a new app, so there are a few things to work out but there's a great forum and support gets back to you quickly with an answer to your question or problem. It's $40, and there is a free one month trial available from their website.

See a video overview of the OLLY app here

Homeschool Minder is an online lesson planner and record keeper. I really like the look of this one. It's clean and simple, but really nice. My favourite as far as design so far. I also really like some of their features, like the book list, for example. Their reports look fantastic, and this program is online instead of being confined to the computer or device you install them on. 

The two big problems I had with them was not really being able to generate multiple lesson plans (instead of typing in each and every lesson) and only being able to bump one lesson ahead, instead of the whole rest of the course going forward one day if we miss say, Math, one day. Generating lessons should get easier in the next month and bumping calendar events ahead should be available by next year. They are also reasonably priced at $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr. I guess the one disadvantage of being online is that you do have to pay every year instead of just buying it outright.

I used Homeschool Skedtrack a few years ago and it worked pretty well for me. This one is FREE as well. I found it a little tricky to learn but once you get the hang of entering things it can go quite quickly as you can copy one assignment multiple times and just change some of the text very easily. There are helpful video tutorials available to help you get started. This is still the one I would have used this year if I hadn't found the OLLY app. 

My Mardel Homeschool is the online version of the very popular paper based A Simple Plan homeschool lesson planners. It's FREE, which is nice. I couldn't find any screenshots, youtube videos, or much of anything about it but since it's free I signed up to try it out. It looks fine, but just a bit awkward for entering assignments. I think it would work well if you were wanting to enter lesson plans and assignments at the beginning of each week instead of all at once at the beginning of the year. It's still in beta, so I'm sure there will be improvements made for a while to come. 

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Those are the ones I've personally tried. These next ones I have not.

HSTOnline stands for Homeschool Tracker Online. I have played around with the basic free downloadable Homeschool Tracker and I did not like it. I wasn't impressed at all, it seemed old and outdated. However, when I watched the video demo of HSTOnline, I thought it definitely would merit another look. Especially when I saw the part about adding multiple assignments. (Can you see my obsession with this yet?) It's a bit pricier, at $60/yr.

Homeschool Planet from the Homeschool Buyers Co-op is touted as being more of a whole family planner, with more than just homeschool in mind. It also does lesson planning, but it's a big all in one for your family. Keep up to date with email or text reminders. More than I need. It's $65/yr. You can read this informative review from examiner.com or watch the video demo. I'd love to know what you think of it if you've tried it.

Scholaric is another online option. I really don't know much about it, but here is a video on creating lessons. It's $65/yr.

The Homeschool Helper App is available for a variety of tablets. It's only $4.99, and looks pretty slick. It has a fun, planner book interface and looks easy to use. I wonder about entering very much data on a tablet, but it might be ok. It would be great if you wanted to keep track of attendance, field trips, etc but not necessarily daily assignments.

View the trailer.

There are two more FREE online planners, Lesson Minder and PER from Homeschool Inc, but I really don't know anything about them. I just know they exist. 

What do you use? Do you prefer a paper planner or an online planner? 

If you know of any others, please leave a link in the comments. :)

New Family Devotional Plans from YouVersion and What's In The Bible?

The YouVersion Bible App and What's In The Bible?, a DVD series created by Phil Vischer (of VeggieTales) have teamed up to bring you a free video devotional series available in the YouVersion App for smartphones and tablets, as well as online. It's a great addition to a homeschool Bible curriculum and a fun way to start the day. These short video clips are professionally done and a lot of fun. 

But don't take my word for it, here's what Buck Denver has to say:

There are six plans available, each with a sample available when you click the link below. Just look for "View a Sample Reading" on the right sidebar. There are colouring pages available for download for some of them as well.

What’s in the Bible: Heroes of the Old Testament tells the stories of some of your favorite Bible characters, showing you how God worked through them—and helping you think about how God wants to work through you, too!  25 days

What’s in the Bible: Comfort shows your family how faithful people from the Bible turned to God for comfort when times got tough. Let your children see how God’s living Word has the power to encourage their hearts. 7 days

The Ten Commandments takes your family on an epic journey to explain why God gave the Ten Commandments to the Israelites. Then Buck and his friends will help you see what they mean in our lives today. 11 days

Walk with Jesus: 21 Days Through Matthew follows the book of Matthew, from Jesus’ birth through His ascension. Learning about Jesus’ life can help your family imagine what our own lives could look like—with Jesus as our guide. 21 days

What’s in the Bible: Holy Week is perfect for the week leading up to Easter Sunday. If you begin this plan together on Palm Sunday, your family can walk with Jesus through His last week on earth—right into His resurrection. 8 days

Why Do We Call It Christmas? connects the modern traditions that most people seem to observe now with Jesus’ birth: Santa Claus? Christmas trees? What do these things have to do with Jesus? Maybe more than you think! 10 days

I also encourage you to check out the What's In The Bible? website, and the Activities Section,  for more Bible learning fun.

Our Favourite Educational Apps

   $2.99

Pocket Phonics lets your little one trace the letters of the alphabet with their finger to learn the shape and teaches them to sound out words right off the bat. This really helped Ironman. He played with it the summer before kindergarten and was at a real advantage for learning to read because he learned the letters by their sounds first. Names of letters came afterwards. He could figure out small words because he could sound them out.

It's good for your kids just learning cursive writing too. They can also trace the letters with their fingers but in cursive. Petunia was really frustrated right off with cursive because it looked so difficult and she couldn't form the right shapes right away so I took away the paper for a while and had her trace her letters in this app. We still go back to it if she's getting frustrated with a particular letter. 

Love this app! It stinks that it's not available for Android as well.

   FREE

Meteor Math is more like an arcade game than just straight math. That makes it fun but it doesn't make it any less effective. This app covers addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. And look, it's free! We've had it a few months now and my kids still like it. That's saying something.

I found a very good review of it on GiggleApps.

   FREE

From the BrainPop site: "The BrainPOP Featured Movie (rotating daily) and BrainPOP Jr. Movie of the Week (rotating weekly) apps regularly deliver fresh movies, quizzes, and bonus features right to your handheld device. They cover a breadth of relevant topics including current events, historical figures and milestones, holidays, curricular subjects, and more." A broad range of topics covering Social Studies, Science, Math, Health, Technology and more. 

For more information check out BrainPop Mobile.

And if you're a homeschooler who hasn't yet discovered http://www.brainpop.com and http://www.brainpopjr.com, I wholeheartedly suggest you check them out. Great resources.

     FREE

Smash Your Food will let your kids have fun smashing a burger, a can of coke, a jelly donut and many other food items and learning about how much sugar, oil and salt these have. They will learn about reading a nutrition label and be motivated to make healthier food choices, all while making a big mess that you don't have to clean up! 

To learn more about FoodN'Me and our goal of educating children about healthy eating habits, visit our website at www.foodnme.com or visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/smashyourfood.

http://www.foodnme.com

$2.99

Bugs N Buttons has18 beautiful different games and activities. So far I usually stay away from the collections of games. I often don't find them to be as well done as a single game but that's not the case here. Some of the included games are:

• Fling bees at a target flower. 
• Fly a butterfly through butterfly valley (tilt to steer). 
• Play tic-tac-toe with a dragonfly. 
• Sort and pack buttons fresh off the factory conveyer belt. 
• Race roaches across the finish grate/line. 
• Remove and sort bugs infesting the button production. 
• Catch bugs frantically scurrying about. 
• Pick apples while dodging bees. 
• Catch buttons falling off Uncle Bob's button truck. 
• Help bugs find their way through mazes. 
• Finish sequences on the letter train.
• Interactively count bugs. 
• Catch colorful fireflies in a jar.
• and more… 

What they teach:

 
• Counting 
• Fine motor skills (i.e. pinching) 
• Path finding 
• Patterns 
• Sorting 
• Tracking 
• and more... 

Check out the GiggleApps review if you want to know more ...

  $2.99

Artkive is "The clutter-free way to save and enjoy your children's artwork." 

Do you feel guilty throwing away artwork you kids make and want to keep forever . . . just like the other 400 pieces they've made this month? You can get rid of the clutter and save it as pictures for you kids to look through. You can also upload their precious creations to make gifts for grandparents, or send them to grandparents as attachments to an email.

"As featured on THE TODAY SHOW, Artkive is the #1 app to chronologically store, share and print your child's artwork or schoolwork."

I don't put everything in here, but it's easier to throw the bulk of it away if it's recorded and saved in this app, because then, you see, it can be FOUND again. It's not lost forever in the sometimes dark hole of iPhoto.

http://www.artkiveapp.com

And an app that we love just because it's fun ...

     .99

Where's My Water is a physics based puzzle game with bright, colourful graphics and a funny storyline.

SWAMPY’S STORY 
Swampy the Alligator lives in the sewers under the city. He is a little different from the other alligators — he’s curious, friendly, and loves taking a nice long shower after a hard day at work. The other alligators have damaged his plumbing and disrupted the water flow. Help Swampy by guiding water to his shower! In Swampy’s Story, play ten themed chapters over 200 levels. Collect Swampy’s ducks and shower items to unlock new puzzles and bonus levels. 

One more app we use daily is Chore Cards, and I'll have a post on that coming soon!

GETTING APPS FOR FREE

I know not all of these apps are free but I only paid for one. The rest have come up free at some point or other. I use the AppShopper app to watch for apps I want to go down in price. I add them to my wishlist and am notified if they change price. Unfortunately it appears to have been removed from the App Store so it's only available through the website.

If you want to find free kid friendly, usually educational apps you should like 1+1+1=1 on Facebook. She often finds and shares free apps. She also shares all kinds of other homeschool related freebies, links and posts.

What are your favourite kids apps?