Itsy Bitsy Spider - by Duck Duck Moose
Itsy Bitsy nature facts with everyone's fave spider song
In the classroom, this app may be a perfect playful companion to a lesson about nature (especially spring, weather, spiders, or metamorphosis) or a nursery rhyme theme. You can prompt kids to think about the relative positions of the objects in the scene -- the spider went "up the waterspout," "down came the rain," it "washed the spider out," then "up came the sun" -- and how they relate to the story told in the song. Don't forget to sing along, or record your own rendition!
Continue readingItsy Bitsy Spider - by Duck Duck Moose is a sing-along app that uses the familiar song's lyrics and setting to create an interactive experience in which students can learn about nature, music, and cause-and-effect. Kids can listen to insect narrator Chloe sing "Itsy Bitsy Spider," or they can record their own version of the song or a story on the app. Chloe, a fly, also provides simple one- or two-sentence lessons, like "A spider has eight legs," or "The Sun is a star that is very hot. Even though the sun is very far from the Earth, it gives us lots of heat and light." Not detailed scientific explanations, but enough info for beginners. Kids can also tap the spider, other objects, kids, or animals on the screen for an interactive surprise.
Continue readingInteractive elements include mini-nature lessons, like a caterpillar morphing into a cocoon and then into a butterfly. A few act like fun mini-games, like the floating hats that kids have to tap at just the right time to have them land on the spider's head. Through the Itsy-Bitsy Spider theme, they learn about plants, nature, animals, and even a bit of counting. Plus, if kids record their own song or story, they can learn a bit about technology and how it works to record and replay a real voice.
A few more audio and visual prompts to clue kids into how to navigate the app would make for a better overall experience. Currently, the opening screen includes a couple of written instructions in words that kids new to reading may or may not be able to read ("Poke" and "Slide the hat up") and there are no audio directions at all. Adding some highlights to interactive objects or a few verbal instructions between song lines may help ease navigation confusion.These changes would catapult this "good" app into "great" status.
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Teacher Reviews
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Landisville, PA
As an adult watching a pre-K student use the app, I appreciated the fact that there were so many different "levels" of learning available. For example, a very young child or one with special needs could simply navigate through the familiar song by clicking on the spider. As I previously mentioned though, some students might need some adult prompting to get them started. A different child might count to 10 with the squirrel by clicking on him to gather more nuts on the roof. Another child may most enjoy listening to the information relating to nature provided by the fly throughout the app on clouds, rainfall, the life cycle of a caterpillar and more. I think that my favorite part of the app was the ability to record the child's voice and have it play back instead of the song. Not only was this fun, but what a great way to have a child hear their own language development! This would be perfect for ELLs and students with speech challenges. For those reasons, I see myself sharing this app with not only kindergarten teachers as a nice way to introduce students to the iPads at school, but also with our district ESL classes, Autistic support classrooms, and speech teachers. In reality, with the limited budget we have for app purchases in our district, these special needs populations are likely the only groups that would be able to obtain funding for a paid app anyway. Fortunately, I believe that these same students would most benefit from using this app anyway.
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