Since students can create individual user accounts on Love to Count by Pirate Trio, this is a perfect app for student-driven math practice. If used daily for 5 or 10 minutes during a period of weeks, students will discover many different concepts in random order, all while building their treasure box rewards. This makes Love to Count by Pirate Trio a surprising and fun math activity kids will look forward to playing time and again. Teachers may also consider using the app to enhance a teacher-led review lesson for small groups, and as another method to approach concepts already introduced in a colorful and memorable way. However, games cannot be selected based on content, so targeted practice is difficult.
Continue readingLove To Count by Pirate Trio includes hundreds of short tasks that help kids bridge the gap between math concepts and real life. With the help of kid pirate characters, this substantial math practice app for kids age 4–7 manages to incorporate practical math concepts such as fractions as well as skills such as recognizing left from right.
Once kids complete a few tasks, they earn letters that form a word and then win a reward from a treasure chest (an image of a pirate bear, for example). Multiple kids can have user accounts and choose their own culturally appropriate avatar. If they each have a user account, their rewards for finishing tasks are maintained, and teachers can view progress for individual students.
Through an almost inexhaustible cache of Common Core-aligned tasks -- asking kids to split a pizza evenly for the pirates or to choose the third starfish in a line -- kids practice math skills and earn virtual rewards. They rapidly move from one task to the next and are prompted to solve tasks by clear voice narration, so pre-readers can play, too. With 700 tasks, there's little chance of them getting bored. Every activity somehow relates numbers to order, time, weight, shape, group, or quantity.
The great idea behind Love to Count by Pirate Trio is that even young kids need to know why math is relevant to everyday life. Making the math games relate to pirates' lives -- sorting shape blocks, catching fish -- just makes it all the more fun and engaging. Love to Count by Pirate Trio empowers kids to practice the math skills they're learning in class and that they need to use now or are likely to need soon.