So I completely forgot that I had planned for Tuesdays and Thursdays to be Core Class Review days.  Meaning, on these two days, we’d review what is being taught in their English, Math, Science, and Social Studies classes.  Today I decided to focus on English and Social Studies, starting with S.S.  I know they are just starting to discuss the 13 colonies, and being that Future Hubby is a S.S. teacher, I asked him for some ideas.  He suggested having the students become very familiar with a map of the United States and what the 13 colonies were.  Being that he taught 8th grade S.S. last year, he had a good idea as to what the kids struggled with then and what he would’ve wanted them to practice more.  I had originally planned to have them look at the map, discuss briefly the Proclamation of 1863, then identify and color the 13 colonies on a worksheet.

Then, a light bulb went off.  Duh–I have iPads.

Out of curiosity, I typed in “13 colonies” in the app search box, and boom:  2 apps that were specific to what I wanted the students to learn showed up.  I was ecstatic! I quickly downloaded JigsawGeo US 13 Original Colonies and Archiving Early America onto their iPads.  They both are wonderful in their own way.  JigsawGeo challenges the students to drag and drop the shape of the state to it’s location on a map in the shortest amount of time.  In addition to this, audio includes a woman’s voice saying the name of each state as it appears.  I really liked that part of the app because the kids were getting a visual along with hearing the name of each state.  This app also has different levels to play, where each level up gets harder. For example, the audio disappears, the clues go away, and the final level gives you the state flag to drag and drop into the correct location.  The students really got into this app.  Best of all, it was free! I kept reminding the students, “Don’t just play the game. Pay close attention to the names of the colonies!” I hoped this would clue them in to the fact that they might need to know some of this information very soon, but it apparently was lost as they continued to play and beat their own score.

Matching each of the 13 colonies to it’s location on the map while simultaneously listening to each colony name being spoken.

The Archiving Early America app offered standard map, satellite, and hybrid views of the 13 colonies.  I really wanted the students to visualize where the 13 colonies were on a United States map as well as where Great Britain was.  The Google Earth-esque component of this app allowed them to do that, giving them a realistic view of those areas.  The students enjoyed zooming in/out of the maps, but were tempted to look for their own houses in the process, so I had to do some redirecting.  This app was also free.  Together, these two apps worked great for their review.

At the end of the class, I asked them to complete an exit slip, which was their ticket out the door.  Their task:  write down as many of the 13 colonies as they could remember.  You should’ve heard all the teeth-sucking and “Aw, man!”s that came out at that point.  Eventually, they all did end up writing down their guesses, with one of my students guessing 6 of the 13 correctly.  Others had 4, some had just 1.  Some of them were correct, some incorrect.

The most interesting guess? New Hamster.  🙂