Quick Math Jr. app review

These past few years I've been extremely lucky to have been given the opportunity to attend some awesome math conferences and trainings. Like most people, I grew up with a bit of math anxiety and I wanted to make sure that my little kinders had the best foundation to hopefully eliminate that possibility. My own understanding of math has changed and more importantly what kiddos need to understand math has shifted. The most important thing when kids start to understand math is NUMBER SENSE. How numbers work together, why 5+5=10, that 6 can be broken down into 1 and 5, 2 and 4, 3 and 3, etc. to infinity. For the past few years in my kinder classes we have a calendar math routine that we do daily to build number sense. Here is what my math board looked like

I also have an electronic version of my calendar that I would do on the ipad in "notablility" that would be mirrored to the apple tv in my room. Even with a daily number sense routine students still need some independent practice, and that is where "Quick Math Jr." comes in. Let me tell you all the reasons why my kiddos and myself love this app.

First, you can have multiple profiles on one device so whether you have a small group of ipads, one ipad, or 1:1 ipads each student can track their own progress.

As kids "play" the game they win different body parts to create their monsters. The thing I love the most when kids are using this app is the excitement they have when winning shark teeth, or a funny hat. The simple motivation is one of the reasons why my students request this app all the time.

The different games are simple, intuitive, and gradually increase in complexity. This ten frame game starts out simply enough but will change to a double decker bus making it change to 2 ten frames, the people will be holding hands so that you have to move 2 or 3 at a time, and the numbers will change to equations.

I love this new feature that was added with the last update; you can see the kids progress on each standard!

This concept seems really simple but can be quite challenging for kids, especially when the start counting backwards, or counting by 2, 5, and 10s.

Subatizing is a skills that we work on daily and I love that this app includes this skill. Subatizing is when you can look a group of items and know the quantity without counting. You start this skills using familiar patterns (dice) and ten frames and then move to scattered patterns.

Balancing the boat with equal amounts. I really like how it starts to add groups of ten and then ones. I love this app and of course think everyone should use it. I hope that your kids and/or students enjoy it as much as I do. Teacher Emily