My Apps Monday

Some of my middle schoolers are...not thrilled about coming to speech.  I have to pull most of my students from their study hall, which means that they miss out on the chance to get their homework done before they go home.  Plus, many have been in speech for at least 6 years, and they know what's hard for them.  Working on things that are hard for them isn't exactly fun, and I get that.

Typically, I have 1-2 activities planned for the session, and if we have time, the last few minutes can go to homework.  For some students with vocabulary needs, I might scrap my activity if they have work that is vocab heavy that we can incorporate.  This year, I was lucky enough to not have to pull many students from different teams at the same time, so I don't have to worry about groups that aren't working on the same material.

My favorite app to use lately for my vocab kids has been the (free) Flashcards+ app

 

Having kids come straight to my room after lunch instead of study hall means the incidence of forgotten text books is pretty high.  Rather than wasting 10 minutes sending the student back to his/her locker for a textbook, I find out what they are learning about in science or social studies, and *boom* flashcards readily available.

How, you ask?  Well, Flashcards+ has a button in the bottom right corner that lets you add a deck from Course Hero or Quizlet. So, my seventh graders that were studying the atmosphere last week?  I put in atmosphere and got a bunch of choices. You can preview first to see if the words are familiar (my kids like to check fist so they aren't being quizzed on words they don't know).  A quick easy (and free!) download, and the deck is yours. When they changed to the water cycle this week, it was a very easy to get a new deck (the water cycle was also a great thing for my fluency and artic students to talk about).   The thirteen colonies?  Easy peasy.  Downloading the deck is almost instantaneous, which is good, because we have a terribly SLOW wifi connection.

Each card has the word on one side, and a swipe to the side flips it for the definition.   There is a check mark, so you can check the ones the students know and leave the others unchecked. You can chose to practice only the unchecked ones if you want to go back at the end to run through the ones the students struggled with.  Swipe down for the next card.

Of course, I could make my own cards when/if I need them using the app.  However, with how quickly topics change in the middle school setting, I love the fact that there are other people who have already done that and that it's fast an easy to generate relevant material. They also have idioms and other figurative language terms.

Most of the vocab that I have found tends to lean towards middle school through high school group.  I haven't found much for my elementary kids, but I haven't done extensive work to find it, either.  You can't add pictures, so it's text heavy.

Have any great decks from Flashcards+ that I should look for?

**I am not getting anything for mentioning this app.  It is, after all, only my second post.  But I always appreciate hearing about apps that are user friendly, and even better if they are free!**