The Best Apps for Guided Reading

Hi everyone!  It's Cori here from Mrs. B's Beehive! Today I am continuing our April discussion about guided reading.  I am focusing on the best apps I've found to make the most out of your small group time!

As several other of my Kinder Tribe friends have mentioned, Jan Richardson's book - Next Steps in Guided Reading is the best place to start when you are beginning your guided reading program!  Following her schedule, here are some apps that work well for each part of a guided reading session.

Sight Words

Jan suggests starting with a sight word review and introduction.  

Sight Word Ninja is a fun game that the students can play independently.  I like that when the students miss a word, the app brings it up again to reinforce it.

Eggy 250 HD is another sight word app that focuses on consistent word recognition, and has a large bank of sight words.

Sight Words and Spelling with Pixopop is a newer app (to me), and what I really love about this app, is that you can create your own sight word list, and have the students practice with the specific words you would like them to.

Letter Recognition

Moving on to letter recognition with your students who are most likely in the Pre-A to B levels.  These apps focus on remembering the name of each letter, and matching upper and lower case.

Little Finder ABC is a fun challenge game.  It gives you 1 minute to see how many letters you can get correct.  My kids love the game aspect of this one.

Little Matchups ABC Alphabet helps students to connect uppercase letters to lower case one, and provides some instruction on letter sounds.  There is also ABC Ninja, like the sight word game that is great for letter recognition.

Letter Sounds

The next part of the guided reading model is letter sounds.  Depending on what level you are at, you might be focusing on beginning, ending, or medial sound recognition.

Gappy Learns Reading  is one of my favorite's because it doesn't spoon feed the answer to the students if they get the question wrong, they have to keep trying! There are different options to focus on beginning, medial, or final sounds, or to spell the entire CVC word.

Montessori Crosswords  also does a great job of scaffolding for the students, and gives them plenty of clues to assist them in figuring out which letter should go in each box.

Writing

Helping students to put a proper sentence together can be a challenge in Kindergarten.  Figuring out what actually classifies as a sentence is a good first step!

Sentence Reading Magic reads the sentence to the student, and then they have to put the sentence in the correct order.

Reading

There are a lot of great reading apps out there, but for my beginning readers, I like to stick with the classics.

Starfall Learn to Read is a fun and engaging app.  The students read the sentence, and after they are done, they get to press the picture, and the character acts out what they just read.  Slap stick humor at its best!

I mean, how can you go wrong with BOB Books? Colorful pictures and follow-up activities with the words in the story make this a necessity for your guided reading program!

What apps am I missing?  Let me know if you have found some fantastic apps for your guided reading groups, I always love learning about new and engaging resources!