Best Apps and Sites for Elementary Students

QuickMath

QuickMath is a great tool for students in Grades 1-6 to build fluency with their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division math facts. With three different levels for each operation, and the ability to track progress after each round of play, this app is an excellent alternative to standard flash cards. Plus, students love that they can write their answer directly on the screen! There are also more wonderful apps in the QuickMath family, including QuickMath Jr. for students in K - 2, and QuickMath Fractions for students in Grades 3-6.

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Math Playground

Math Playground is an incredible site with a wealth of math games, logic puzzles and a variety of 
problem solving activities. It is a great resource for arcade style math games, digital manipulatives for illustrating mathematical concepts and operations, and even coding practice. With over 500 different activities to choose from, it will be hard for any child to complain about being “bored” with the games.

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Epic!

Epic! is a digital library for children offering over 25,000 high-quality ebooks, audiobooks, learning videos, and quizzes for kids 12 and under. This app’s award-winning service includes a wide variety of high-quality books and learning videos from leading publishers like Scholastic, National Geographic, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Smithsonian and many more. The Epic! library contains everything from picture books to chapter books, early readers, audiobooks, graphic novels, non-fiction titles, educational books, videos and more, and it even offers books in Spanish and Chinese.

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Homer

Homer is an incredible literacy app for children age 2-8. With thousands of lessons and activities that target the development of phonics skills, sight word knowledge, the ABCs and more, this app is a great way to build confidence with the earliest of reading skills. In addition, the app also includes tons of digital books and interactive stories to promote independent reading from a young age. Homer Reading has been proven to increase early reading scores by 74% with just 15 minutes a day. And with stories and activities customized to each child’s interests, they’ll learn while having fun.

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BrainPop Jr.

BrainPop Jr. will help kids as young as 5 learn something about any topic they can dream of in a developmentally appropriate way. Ideal for kids in Kindergarten through grade 3, BrainPOP Jr. spans topics across Science, Social Studies, Reading, Writing, Math, Health, Arts, and Technology. The gentle, humorous, and relatable characters Annie and Moby serve as guides through each topic, empowering kids to form their own ideas. BrainPOP Jr. is designed to cultivate critical thinking skills and encourage children to ask questions and make connections.

Digital Tools for Middle School (and beyond)

Flashcards of the Future

Quizlet is an online and app-based interactive flashcard system that is invaluable for digitally minded students who can progress with relatively little friction through flashcards sets they create in advance of tests or quizzes. Creating a basic account is free, and offers access to the platform’s quiz games and “learn” feature, which tracks performance and selects the cards that continue to give students trouble, effectively tailoring the test to what the student knows and doesn’t know. A recent update makes Quizlet especially easy to use with vocabulary lists — when you enter a word into the list, Quizlet will automatically generate definitions for you to choose between from its built-in dictionary. Another under-explored feature of Quizlet is the library of crowd-sourced lists — while usually students will want to make their own lists based on their specific material, study lists already exists for many common courses (such as AP US History, or Spanish II). These can be used as a way to check student work and preview or review a difficult textbook reading. 

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Student News

Newsela is a news aggregator focused on providing articles for students - this means that its staff gathers articles from news sources across the web, and then adjusts them to its audiences in schools. The articles are organized by topic area, and often published ‘adaptively,’ so that students can select their reading level and the article’s text will subtly change (in its vocabulary and syntax) according to their individual skill. 

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The Digital Classroom

Khan Academy is a fantastic resource for short video lessons, generally focused on math, science, and computer science at all grade levels. This is a great place to go for additional practice in a particular subject area — along with videos, there are short tests and practice questions that students can use to test their understanding. There are also diagnostic quizzes that will help place students along the spectrum of skill levels, and a point system that allows students to earn badges for mastering content. The core feature, though, is video content that can be paused, replayed, slowed down, so that students can review a challenging concept from class at their own pace while working through a difficult homework task. And heads up for the high school years — Khan Academy recently partnered with Collegeboard to offer a completely free SAT prep curriculum, including practice tests and problem breakdowns. 

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Brainpop

Brainpop is another resource for educational videos and games—but with an animated, cartoon look that is approachable and engaging, better for some students than the blackboard aesthetic of Khan Academy (and with a wider range of topics). 

High School Helpers

Online Reading Guides

 Lit Charts is a competitor of SparkNotes, and offers a well-designed theme-tracking interface that makes it easy to ‘chart’ the development of a major theme from chapter to chapter, which can be very helpful when seeking out evidence for an analytical essay — there’s even a section on important quotes organized by theme. It’s also a source for very thorough summary and analysis breakdowns, chapter by chapter and page by page, so that students can preview difficult texts or review before an exam. Two more helpful features: the literary devices and terms reference guide, and a modern, line by line adaption of every play by William Shakespeare. 

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Academic Writing Centers

Academic writing centers can provide guidance as students begin to embark on more challenging essay assignments. The Harvard Writing Center site offers tips for each step of the writing process, from breaking down an assignment to developing a thesis, and from rough draft to final copy. The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) is another great resource for academic writing — when we use Purdue OWL with students, though, it’s most often specifically to explore the comprehensive guide to citation practices. Whether your student’s teacher prefers MLA, APA, or Chicago Style citations, Purdue OWL is one of the web’s best references for the nuanced formatting requirements of a well-made bibliography. 

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Citation Tools

BibMe, or any of its comparable competitors (such as Easybib, Citationmachine, Citefast), is a quick and easy upgrade to the traditional approach to creating a bibliography. Students can enter the title of a book, journal article, or website, specify a style of citation, and then sit back while the site seeks out the relevant publication information and generates a complete citation. As with any time-saving digital shortcut, though, be sure to double check the site’s work, so that the occasional glitch does not slip by undetected.

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The Google Toolbox

Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets — Students today will no doubt already have encountered the most common of these Google Apps before high school, but now is the time to master them. It’s worth taking the time to create an organizational system for docs and slides in Google Drive, broken down by school year and subject. Students should also play around with the different collaboration tools, learning how to make suggested edits and respond to comments. With the right adjustment in settings, Google Docs can also be edited and composed offline, which can be incredibly valuable when students are fighting to remain focused in the always-connected cybersphere. One under appreciated app in the Google toolbox is Google Keep, an intuitive checklist maker and digital bulletin board that can be a useful place to track assignments and gather notes - an easily installable extension in Google Chrome will allow students to pin any article from across the web on their Keep platform, and notes can then be tagged to a specific category and color coded for organization. Encourage students to explore how they can customize their experience with these apps to work more efficiently and increase their productivity.

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Spellchecker 2.0

Grammarly is an online grammar checking app that can effectively proofread both academic papers and everyday emails; if students submit an essay to the Grammarly platform, they can receive a detailed breakdown of grammatical errors with short explanations or suggested fixes, cleanly and clearly displayed. The app will also automatically detect plagiarism, using a web-scraping capability similar to that now used by many teachers to check over digitally submitted assignments. With this function, students can be alerted to any quotes or ideas in their work that haven’t been properly cited before they turn it in as a finished product. 

Smarter Summers: High School

As students embark on the latter half of their high school careers, the prospect of what comes after looms large on the horizon. The college search involves a daunting combination of introspection, research, testing, and logistics that can feel overwhelming even for the most organized student—and it arrives at a time in their academic career when most students are also facing more pressure at school than ever before. That’s why it’s increasingly important to make the best use of summer breaks to get ahead in the college application process. For older students this means focused review for standardized tests, brainstorming for the personal essay, and college visits. Importantly, though, it also means that even students early in their high school years need to take advantage of the summer break to find a passion project, learning experience, service opportunity, or summer job that will spur meaningful growth, offer exposure to a potential area of study or interest, and, as a result, provide them with compelling material to relate during the admissions process. 

These days, more and more students forestall the age-old question: what do you want to be when you grow up? And that’s okay! In a rapidly-changing world where young adults are expected to hold more distinct jobs than any generation before them, flexibility and openness are prerequisites. However, rather than an excuse to avoid reflecting on their future goals, this open-ended world creates an invitation (even an obligation) to explore the possibilities that await. Students will be increasingly responsible for navigating their own way through the thicket of opportunities, rather than stepping onto a career path that is clearly marked out for them from the start. The open days of summer are a first taste of this freedom, which can be equal parts exciting and overwhelming. What students do with the summer months is up to them, but it’s our job to guide them into experiences that will help them to better define their future goals, and to take real steps toward meeting them.

These summer experiences often serve as the source material for a student’s personal essay, which conveys to admissions officers the particular qualities that a student can bring to their school. It also makes sense to use the summer to begin the development of this essay as well, during a relatively slow moment in the year when students have the time to reflect and experiment. That’s why Smarten Up will offer a week-long intensive in the personal essay this summer, developing original and effective essay drafts in a small group setting. Together we will break down successful examples of this type of essay, learning a set of best practices to employ as we also experiment to find the right story for each individual student. The personal essay is a student’s chance to share their unique voice with admissions officers—but ‘be unique’ is, of course, uselessly vague advice. The workshop will focus on the actionable steps in the writing and revision process that will allow this unique voice to emerge. 

Will you join us? Email mara@smarten-up.com for more information. 

Creative Writing for the Teenage Soul

A central part of the human experience is finding effective ways to express ourselves and be understood by others. As children we can work through complex feelings, emotions, and ideas, with our parents, teachers, or a trusted caregiver. As adults we have partners, siblings, and life long friends to hash out our thoughts with. Unfortunately, though, it’s during the tumultuous teenage years when it is often feels most difficult to find a good listener. For many students, creative writing can be a great outlet that leads not only to emotional catharsis, but also to improved writing skills!

Whether writing poems, stories, plays or lyrics, the process of putting thoughts down on paper is a great way to reflect and process without fear of judgement. Troubling thoughts that might otherwise fester and breed negativity, anger, and self-consciousness can be exorcised from the brain as teens acknowledge them and attempt to move on. There is no fear of confrontation and no need to be on the defensive or offensive; instead, creative writing offers students the opportunity to reflect and hopefully learn from experience.

Apart from being a therapeutic form of self-expression, creative writing is also good for communication and problem-solving. A writer must describe an experience or scenario in a way that will make the reader fully believe and even feel the things the writer is feeling. This requires an amazing vocabulary, heightened awareness, and empathy. When students translate abstract observations and feelings into well-formed sentences and paragraphs, they are engaging in the human experience: learning, listening, and decoding. After all, storytelling is the oldest form of human communication and exists in every culture and society; when a student is able to engage another person in their story, not only does it feel good, that child is also learning how to create a meaningful social bond.

Creative writing is beneficial to students on so many levels. It encourages emotional development and self-confidence, and improves teenagers’ ability to empathize and connect with others. At the same time, creative writing also leads to academic gains as students learn how to analyze the world around them and communicate their ideas about it with more clarity and sensitivity. We are all driven to reflect on and understand our environment, and to try and make things better both for ourselves and those around us. By encouraging independence, empathy, catharsis and expression, creative writing is one of the best ways to ensure a child becomes a conscientious and well-rounded adult!