Lively content suggestions (English teaching and early math practice)

I’ve really enjoyed the “Jolly Phonics Lessons” app from jollylearning.co.uk – the one with the mouse wearing an academic mortar board on a yellow background. Material under the Lessons and the Games tabs is excellent. The company owner, Gilbert Jolly, has indicated that he would be okay with having the app installed on RACHEL. (I can copy Jeremy with his email ??)

A very good English grammar app “Speedy English Grammar” comes from Wobble Monkey. The icon has part of a British flag in the top right corner. Like many such apps, you can’t jump in anywhere the first time you use it; you have to work your way through to get to the grayed out content. Wobble Monkey also has a “Grammar Smash” and “Verb Smash” apps that use the same approach.

A nice app to learn and review addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division tables comes from Gunjan Apps studios (GA Studios) titled: “Math Games Learn Add Subtract Multiply & Divide”. The icon has a green chalkboard background with white chalk markings: 2 + 2 = ? etc. The “Duel” game splits and inverts half the screen so that two players can face one another to compete to answer math calculation questions such as 7 x 12 = ? A lot of fun and makes a good break from learning English.

All these apps are free, work on Android, and can be used offline. Not to be disrespectful to “Feed the Monster”, but I find these apps definitely more appealing.

The Amazon Fire 8 tablets that we will be using do not allow access to the Google play store so I had to download them from 3rd party providers. I’ve used the apkpure and apkmonk sites – so far without problem.

Paul Kenton
(I chose Charlie – my dog’s name – as a user name when I registered my RACHEL not thinking about it appearing on Forums.)

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Hi Paul – all of these are great suggestions! We don’t, by default, include any operating specific tools. There are lots of wonderful apps out there, but the majority of our users are still in a desktop or laptop environment (usually Windows or Ubuntu).

There are a few instances where we created a “module” with an app or two inside them, but those were for specific use cases where there was a partner who really wanted that.

I have seen quite a few users build or load up .apk files and allow for app sideloading in android, but it’s just a lot of technical work and would provide a nonfunctional user experience to our desktop and laptop users.

Best,
jeremy

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