Play and Learn Science

Play and Learn Science
By PBS Kids
Available as a free download from the App Store, Amazon, and Google Play.

This free app was the first ever winner of the award for Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media which recognizes distinguished apps for an early learning audience.

This app teaches basic science concepts to preschool and kindergarten age children with several different games and includes a "parents" side of the app with supplemental material and an explanation of core concepts learned in the games. This might all sound a little boring and school-y, but this app is seriously fun. For kids - it's fun, brightly colored, easy to use, and doesn't rely on text explanations as so many toddler apps confusingly do. One of my favorite games is called "Shadow Scenes" where kids can add things (like animals, plants, houses, etc.) to a landscape and watch how their shadows change over the course of a day. It's simple, it's effective, it's wonderfully educational.

Comments

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages. Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...

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National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography. The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?). Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry. This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.

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