7 Of The Best Educational Apps for Children 5 to 8

Children love to play games on smartphones or tablets. And why shouldn’t they? They’re so interactive, colorful, and creative, so kids are immediately drawn them. Fortunately these same qualities make it possible for apps that have educational components to be equally attractive to children. For those just starting their schooling experience, these apps can help improve their learning skills.


1. Marble Math Junior


This app obviously targets the child’s math skills. It combines math games with math word problems. It is designed for early readers who can listen to the problems read out loud by touching the words on the screen if necessary.
The games are customizable, but also fun and effective; kids easily forget they’re practicing math skills as they play games related to shape recognition, adding, and subtracting.


2. Monkey Word School Adventure


This app helps with recognizing letters and words for early readers. It is designed to challenge children between 4 and 7 years of age by quickly adjusting to the appropriate word levels depending upon their initial responses. This way it keeps them moving forward and learning at the right level at their own pace.


Sight words and phonics are combined to teach kids a variety of decoding strategies that will help build their reading skills.


3. Barefoot World Atlas


This app targets social studies skills and geographical-related topics like people and animals from different parts of the world. Kids can spin, pinch or zoom to find topics that interest them. They learn more about people and nature around the world by selecting photos and descriptions.


The program uses beautiful graphics and photos, as well as high-quality narration with fun-filled facts to draw kids into learning that is fun and informational.


4. Toca Lab


This app introduces young kids to basic chemistry and the general concept of the periodic table. It allows children to experiment using a virtual chemistry lab. They get to use lab equipment like Bunsen burners, centrifuges, oscilloscopes, and test tubes.


Kids swipe, tap, or hold down images to affect changes to alter the 118 elements. Using blobby-looking images with fun faces to represent the elements kids will enjoy playing with the game while learning more about the chemical world. Toca Lab makes science experiments fun, engaging, and educational – and there’s no need for safety goggles.


5. Angry Birds Space


At first blush this may not seem to hold much in the way of education for children, but there are certain elements of this app that targets some basic physics concepts. It features the same physics related puzzles that are part of the original game Angry Birds, but with levels that take place in outer space. Kids learn about gravitational forces on an object based upon their relative sizes. There are 60 new free levels that cross between two worlds, and 15 bonus levels. HD versions are available for the iPad and certain Android devices for $2.99


6. The Human Body by Tinybop


This app targets students by teaching them about the human body and its senses and organs. It uses six interactive, layered, and animated models children can learn from. There are not instructions, simply the child’s informal investigation of a highly intriguing set of images and information. There are levels throughout that detail the anatomy, and help children build their biology vocabulary. 


7. Art Set


This highly interactive app targets children’s artistic skills with a plethora of artistic tools. Kids (and adults) can create extremely beautiful art projects using virtual “paper,” crayons, pencils, pens, paints, pastels, markers along with texturing and blending tools. Kids can even paint over photos stored on the tablet. It may sound complicated with so many options, but kids find it intuitive – they will easily located colors, mediums and the tools they want to draw and paint whatever comes into their minds.It’s a great tool for entertaining kids who want to increase their artistic skills without creating piles of paper, dozens of empty paint tubes, and scores of broken crayons.


Many more educational apps are appearing all the time. Search out those that you believe will best help your little ones just starting school.

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1 Comment

  1. Casey H
    September 25, 2014 / 8:56 pm

    Thanks for round-up. I like Angry Birds myself:)

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