Kindergarten iPads

This week I had been subbing in a kindergarten classroom. This was the first time I had ever done anything in a kindergarten classroom so I was very excited. Luckily, the teacher I was subbing for had a student teacher. The student teacher was the one that was fully teaching the class, so I mainly followed her instruction for what she wanted me to do with the students. The majority of the classroom time was spent in small groups, which was very nice. I spent most of the time with the students during math. This is when we spent the most time focusing on each student and how they were doing in math.

This week, the kindergarten class was learning all about different kinds of shapes; mainly 3-D. The students had been making little shape books with pictures and the names and they had also been working on matching shapes with the proper name. I was in charge of a small group where we would be using the iPads. The student teacher told me which app to have the students use. She told me to use Shapes Memory Match.

The Shapes Memory Match app had everything! you could choose from three different categories of games. You could choose from shape-shape, pictures & shapes, or just pictures. These different categories represented the different levels. When you picked which category you wanted to use, you could choose from a memory game, in which you had to flip over the cards and match them based off your memory. Or, you could choose the, show me, game where all the cards were shown to you and you had to match the cards based off what was on them.

I worked with two different small groups during their math time. I first worked with a lower group. I
brought out the iPad and decided to start off with the shape-shape game. We also did the show me category where the students just had to match the given shapes that were shown. For example, there would be six cards with different shapes on them shown. Each student would have a turn matching the same shapes together. They might be triangles, squares, rectangles, hexagons, etc. We passed the iPad around so each student would have a turn. The students flew through this level quite easily. I decided to try the memory game with them. They had to flip over the given cards and match what each shape was. We spent the majority of our time doing this. They loved it! Since they played this for a while, each student had a turn for their own game.

The second group I worked with was a higher math group. I decided to start with the pictures & shapes category first. This is where the card would show a piece of cake, and the student would have to match it with the card that showed a triangle. We did the show me game first. The students were able to see all the cards and they matched each one according to the picture and shape. We passed the iPad around so each student would have a turn. After a few minutes of this they wanted to try the memory game. We still continued with the pictures & shapes. The students struggled a bit more with remembering where the shapes were, however they did very well with this and loved the game. Each
student had their own turn playing a game.

Shapes Memory Match was such a great app for these kindergarteners. I could tell they loved the game and just wanted to keep playing it. This game allowed the students to not only recognize shapes and their names, but also recognize real objects that are in a particular shape. This gave them real-world examples of shapes that we see every day. I also loved that it helped the students build their memory as well. I would absolutely play this game with the students again!