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8 Apps to Engage Elementary Learners This Summer

8 Apps to Engage Elementary Learners This Summer

 8 Apps to Engage Elementary Learners This Summer. Help prevent the summer slide with these digital activities for the iPad or tablet.

Guest post by: Ethan Miller

Summer vacations - that time of the year that students look forward to the most! The much needed break at the end of each academic year gives students a chance to let their hair down and have fun. With unlimited ice creams, video games, summer camps, and quality time with family, it isn’t hard to see why kids love summer vacations.

But for parents, it is quite a task to keep their active kids engaged and to ensure that there is minimal summer learning loss. While vacation time is all about having fun, there are ways to integrate learning with fun to engage today’s tech-savvy children. Here are 8 apps to ensure a fun learning experience for elementary learners this summer:        


Everyone would agree that it is essential to develop critical thinking, analytical, and problem solving skills in young learners. Analogies 4 Kids is an app dedicated to cultivate the aforementioned skills in kids through a fun and interactive platform. It has over 450 multiple choice questions that can be categorized as Picture Analogies and Word Analogies. It helps children to draw a relation between images and helps them understand spatial concepts. Since it involves problem solving and it boosts confidence with every right answer, Analogies 4 Kids will quickly grow on kids and will soon be one of their favorite apps.  

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Suitable for age group: 6-11 years    

Amazon’s Kindle is undoubtedly a great gift for kids who love to read. But, in my opinion, Kindle is also a wonderful app for introducing your kids to the world of books. Summer vacations are the perfect time for kids to discover the pleasure of reading and the Kindle app is the perfect reading tool as it provides access to thousands of free books ranging from novels to comics and graphic novels. Apart from being completely free, it is compatible with Android, PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 8.   

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Suitable for age group: 8-11 years

Who doesn’t love buzzer rounds in quiz shows? How about you create your own quiz show with a makeshift buzzer and the Cram app? This flashcard app is great for developing vocabulary, learning math formulas and learning new languages. With options to create your own flashcards, you can put on the quiz master’s hat and make kids compete against each other, creating a fun learning environment. One can also choose from two inbuilt games in the app to test one’s knowledge by loading a set of flashcards.    

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Suitable for age group: 6-11 years

This amazing app takes kids on a virtual tour across the globe by allowing them to explore continents, countries, cities, oceans, mountains, flora, fauna, and much more. It helps kids understand different cultures across the globe and keeps them up-to-date with current events of the world. It is a great way to spark the kids’ interests in geography and environment studies. With an interactive 3D globe, vibrant colors, and captivating graphic design, children are bound to fall in love with Barefoot World Atlas.

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Suitable for age group: 6-11 years

Doodle Buddy is a wonderful addition to the list of summer apps as it provides a great platform for kids to dabble with color and have fun. With tons of stickers, stamps and cool backgrounds, this app not just unleashes a child’s artistic talents but also gives wings to their imagination. With a number of easy-to-use painting and editing tools, Doodle Buddy can help uncover the hidden painter in your child.

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Suitable for age group: 5-11 years.

Math is one of the subjects that most kids struggle with. Well, here comes Sushi Monster to the rescue, making Math fun and easy to learn. This app game is perfect for helping kids understand basic math concepts like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. With over 12 levels of game play, learning and practicing math has never been so enjoyable. To sum it up, Sushi + Math + Fun = Sushi Monster.

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Suitable for age group: 6-9 years.

Kids love to watch cartoons. But what if there is an app that allows kids to create cartoons? Toontastic is a fantastic app that helps nurture the storyteller in kids by allowing them to draw, animate and narrate stories of their own. This app allows young learners to design characters, develop plot lines, add voiceovers and soundtracks to turn their ideas into engaging cartoons. From adventure and sci-fi flicks to school reports and documentaries, Toontastic gives a wide range of story options to choose from. It even allows kids to add their own faces to the characters! It’s the perfect app to unveil the storyteller in your child.

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Suitable for age group: 6-11 years.


Grammar is the key to reading, writing, and speaking the English language. But learning and remembering grammar rules can be a tiring task. Thanks to the Grammaropolis app, learning English grammar can be a fun experience for kids. Through videos, quizzes, games, and books featuring animated characters, this app uses cool examples and makes English grammar easier for kids to understand. Take your child to Grammaropolis - the place where grammar lives!  

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Suitable for age group: 7-11 years.  

Parents should encourage their children to use these apps, but they should avoid imposing it on them as summer vacation is all about having fun after all! I hope these apps help you in minimizing summer break learning loss. If you have a personal favorite summer app that is not listed here, do let me know in the comments!   

Author's Bio:

Ethan Miller is an online ESL tutor. Apart from his passion for teaching, he loves to write and holds a degree in creative writing. When he is not teaching or working on his book, Miller loves to blog and is a huge fan of educational technology. You can follow Miller on Twitter and check out his blog.