Apps for Baby

I have a five month old niece who is always interested in what I am doing. She was watching me check my ipad so I ran a quick search to see what apps were free and baby safe.

I stumbled across one called "baby photos" by fisher price. I vaguely remember a DVD of babies being a popular thing for babies to watch so downloaded it out of interest. The app is completely free, no in app purchases and very well made. When you fire it up it gives a little security hint to help make sure your tiny tot doesn't accidentally close the app and play on other things. 

I elected to use it with the guided access feature built into all ipads for added safety. 

Straight out of the box, so to speak, the app is essentially a slide show of photographs of babies pulling pleasant faces, accompanied by a twinkly soundtrack and giggling noises. When baby touches, or in this case - lunges at the screen, twinkles and stars appear under baby's hands. 

To say my niece loved this would not do her reaction justice. She was enthralled. She looked carefully at the faces, touched them and chased the resulting twinkles with her fingers. When the game giggled she squealed with delight. She concentrated like this, highly engaged, for several minutes. 

The app asks for permission to access your device's photos, there's no uploading or photo stealing, but what the app can do is use your own photos, so that baby can enjoy a slide show of faces they recognise. 

We didn't get the chance to set this up before bed time but I will definitely be having a go after the engagement and enjoyment this evening. 

Now for the teacher part, if like me you are always interested in what your little one is learning through their play, this is how this app links to "development matters" the govt guidance on learning progression in birth to fives. 

- the app encourages babies to look at faces, teaching eye contact essential for communication and language as well as social skills that underpin problem solving and collaborative learning later.  

- the touch sensitive twinkles demonstrate cause and effect, early science. They also capture baby's interest in the effect of movement that leaves marks, a precursor for writing. 

- the emotion appropriate sounds help consolidate baby's understanding of feelings and interaction as well as helping them to recognise familiar sounds. 

- the simplicity, and lockability, means baby can learn essential independence skills and boost their self confidence by learning and playing with parental guidance, instead of passively watching a screen. 

Not bad for a free little app. 

I had a look at the other fisher price apps, almost all of which are free, and free from in app purchases too. There are some excellent ideas, the high contrast apps look particularly interesting. I've downloaded a few more to try. 

What have we been getting up to this week? and turning apps into assessment tools

It's Eid at the weekend, Eid Mubarak! In order to celebrate Eid and share this happy time with our families, we have been busy making Eid cards. I decided to use a very simple card template at this stage in the year. We painted the palms of our hands gold and bronze, and mixed a beautiful emerald green for the fingers that looked like the beautiful colour you see on the roofs of Mosques. We printed these onto white paper and attached them to rainbow cards reminiscent of the beautiful colourful clothes that people wear to celebrate Eid.

Next week we are having an Eid party so I look forward to seeing the children have a wonderful time in their rainbow colours. It's one of my favourite times of year.

Something else I love about this time of year is the smell of the changing seasons. Although it's now dark when I get up for work (and getting up in the dark does make waking up early a chore!) the smell of the air when I step outside, more than makes up for it. There's a wonderful stillness when it's dawn and being able to be part of that is very calming and beautiful if you take a moment to breathe it in before you begin your busy day.

Nursery decided to go for a walk in the park and as luck would have it we picked the sunniest day of the week. It was still cold and we zipped our coats up (a good job, as it started to rain just as we set off back to school!) and set off together to the park on our first walk of the year. We are lucky to have a nice big park just a few streets away and took a few bags with us to collect some nice Autumny things to use back in the nursery. The iPads really proved their worth as photos and notes could be quickly snapped, ready to upload straight to Tapestry without requiring you to take your eyes off the group. We collected so many conkers, oak branches and beautiful leaves that we were able to make some leaf prints straight away and save some for focused work next week!

I was wary of the leaves turning damp and unpleasant in the plastic bags so have transferred them to a wire basket and strung a garland of the most colourful across the nursery to dry out and bring the Autumn indoors to us.

I love to find new uses for things, and try to think outside the box when it comes to my classroom. The app store told me that the post-it app was app of the week, so I downloaded it, as I usually do, to test it out. This app is AMAZING. It allows you to snap a photo of a group of post-its and reorganise them on your device. Obviously this is incredibly useful for those meetings where you end up with lots of post it's on the wall (surely i'm not the only one where this is seemingly all my meetings?) After clapping my hands in joy, my first thought was to things other than post-its, naturally. It occurred to me to lay out the children's Eid cards on the floor and snap a photo of them from above to see if it would recognise the inside portion of the card as a post-it. It did. Now all those first signatures are stored on my ipad in evernote, which the post-it app neatly allowed me to export the now organised signature-turned-writing samples to, I plan to use this method to collect samples and turn them into class writing sample boards which I can store in evernote as a progress scrapbook, this will give me a massive amount of qualitative data, but add only minutes to my assessment timeframe. Truly amazing.