1. Parenting – School Years
This is the magazine that parents tend to forget about after they’re done with the crawling and diaper years, yet the magazine is filled with great information and advice for parenting all ages of children, not just babies and toddlers. They have special issues dedicated to parenting the school-age children.
Included in this free app are fifteen page sample “magazines” of each issue. You can either browse through the sample or buy the full magazine. What’s great about it is that we all know not every issue of a magazine is filled with stuff that relates to us. You can browse through the sample, and if you decide you want the full issue, can download it through the app. Or, if you decide you don’t want to miss a single issue, you can subscribe to it from within the app as well.
2. School A to Z
While the Parenting magazine gets you prepared for having school-age children, it doesn’t do a whole lot to help you when your child comes home and wants to know what a cinquain is. It’s the kind of thing that made the show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” so successful. If it’s something we’re not using, we forget it ten, twenty, thirty years out of school.
That’s where this app is extremely helpful. It gives us all the answers our children come to us for. You can either let them know that you’re getting help from this app, or look it up secretly and let them think you always knew it was a type of poem with a five-line pattern. It also helps you with common math terms, as well as technology and other types of assignments.
Additionally, School A to Z includes games to help your children learn on their own. There’s Math Monkey which quizzes them on their multiplication tables, either by number or random. There is also a Spelling Bee that gives kids spelling words based on difficulty, or allows you to set up a spelling bee for them based on their spelling words for the week.
3. School & Stuff
It can get really hard to keep track of kids these days, from how they’re doing in school to what they’re doing after school. This app helps parents keep it all together. It allows you a page for each of your kids, and lets you keep tracks of their grades and GPA. Many schools now keep track of grades online, so after you check up on your kids and see how they’re doing, you can then record it in this app.
When you’re trying to figure out which child goes to which activity, this app can help with that as well. Set it up with the activities, addresses, phone numbers, etc., and plot out each child’s schedule. Additionally, with the phone numbers and other info, it helps you know who to get ahold of when there is a problem or someone is sick and not going to make it to football or ballet.
4. iStudiez
Now that all the parenting duties are taken care of, it’s time to hand it all over to the kids … within reason. This app will allow you to show them how it’s done. You can help them set up everything to be sure they stay on track in their classes and with their assignments. They can fill in each of their classes, their teachers’ names, and keep track of their schedule on the app. It syncs with the calendar app on the iPad, so it includes appointments, work, activities, etc.
This app works on both the iPad and the iPhone, so kids can sit in their class and get assignments and enter it into their phones. They can put in both what they’re doing that day in class, as well as what their homework assignments are. It’ll sync up to your iPad so that you can keep abreast of everything they need to do. When they come home that afternoon, you know exactly what homework they need to do.
Sending kids to school shouldn’t be a headache. These apps help take that headache away to keep everything organized so that you know what they need to do and how to help them. Better yet is that they’re all free. The exception is iStudiez. It has a free version, but it will only organize three classes. Download the free version, and if it works out well for those three classes, then download the paid version and keep it all organized.
