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Charades! Kids App Review

Vocab, vocab, and more vocab!  I think back to my days in English class as a student at Pentucket Regional High School.  Every week we were assigned a new vocab unit with 20 words to memorize.  We would use our vocab book to complete exercises, have a review on Thursday, and take a quiz on Friday.  We would swap quizzes with our classmates to correct them as a class.  This would usually follow with us students arguing that two different words could have been used to answer a certain question.  For some reason we all knew we could barter an extra point or two if we somehow came to a consensus that the question was too arbitrary to have just one answer.  We went through the same exact procedure for my Spanish class.  Music vocabulary was standard in our mid-terms and finals for concert band as well.

The traditional norm of studying and reviewing vocabulary words is making flashcards.  Charades! Kids brings the excitement of knowledge acquisition to a new level through a fun game.  The teacher uploads vocab words to the app.  The app generates a link for the students to download on their IOS devices.  The students split up into small groups and one person places their device on their forehead.  Five seconds pass after hitting the screen once and a vocab word appears.  The students in the group must then do everything they can to get the student holding the device to guess which vocab word is on the screen.  Classmates are not allowed to scream the word out.  Once a student guesses correct, he/she points the device downward and a new vocab word appears.  Eventually the buzzer goes off and the device is handed to a neighboring student and the process starts again.

I enjoy this app mainly because it is so practical!  There are so many apps out there that are just fluff.  I like to find apps which enhance current classroom procedures.  When thinking about learning vocab, I truly believe in charades, raps, and memorization techniques.  .....I can still remember all of my helping verbs thanks to my seventh grade teacher Mr. Boulanger making us chant them out loud.

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