9 Essential Back-to-School Apps for Kids

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser, Walmart Family Mobile. All opinions are mine alone. #SummerIsForSavings #CollectiveBias #WFM4

 

Back to school is a busy time for parents and students. Which is why each my family and I pack our bags for an official summertime vacation. Our goal, to pack in as much fun and frugal quality time, and education we can before the start of the next school year. This past weekend we hit the road to check out our state’s aviation, robotics, and engineering museum at Mississippi State University.

As you can imagine, the vacation expenses for a family of three can quickly add up. Even for in-state staycations. Which is why I am always on the lookout for savvy saving ways to cut expenses throughout our household each year. Savings which directly fund our back-to-school trips each year!

This included my family cellular service. At Walmart, I found the LG L59 Grace. Part of the Walmart Family Mobile. A device that helps my family not only communicate better but helps to stretch our family entertainment budget even further. It’s awesome to know that I won’t have to sacrifice service and safety to have great cellular coverage at home and on-the-go.

With this plan, I now have TRULY Unlimited Talk, Text, & Data◊ which is a giant leap up from the plan we previously had before. With Walmart Family Mobile, I’m not paying extra for Walmart Family Mobile’s T-Mobile’s nationwide 4G network.

To get started I simply picked up my phone at my local Walmart and within a few minutes of being home was able to pick my plan and activate my service from the comfort of my patio garden!

There were no activation fees, no late charges, and I now get more data (on most plans) than my previous plan! Walmart has the best pricing in no-contract wireless plans and is the simplest to activate. Since my husband also has Walmart Family Mobile we get a discount for having my new line too!

My new $49.88 TRULY Unlimited Plan from Walmart Family Mobile has become my favorite new way to save for frugal family fun. The best part? This plan helps to give our family the freedom to fit more adventure in our summer budget.

Normally planning summertime trips can be a true drudgery. Luckily, planning this last trip was all the more easy with the $49.88 TRULY Unlimited Plan from Walmart Family Mobile– I was able to plan our trip, map out fuel stations, save directions, buy museum tickets, and reserve our hotel reservation from my home patio. It was that simple!

Then with my awesome new phone in-hand we set off on two days of education-packed fun! As we were anticipating 6 full hours of in the car travel in front of us our first day, I thought this would be the perfect time to use our new LG L59 Grace to get in some educational time in for the kiddo! With the back-to-school season is just around the corner check out our list of the 9 must-have educational apps to get your kiddos ready for the 2017-2018 academic year (especially for long trips in the car).

9 Must-Have Apps For Back-to-School:

1) Socratic: Sometimes, a difficult question can stump your child. That’s where the Socratic app comes in. Just take a picture of a question and Socratic then uses artificial intelligence to figure out which concepts you need to know and shares explanations and resources to help your kiddo complete their homework and assignments. It’s free for ios and Android.

2) WonderBox: WonderBox is a family-friendly app for creating and sharing math and building exercises for kids in a social-style feed. There’s also a collection of YouTube videos to spark real-world creation and play. It’s free for ios and Android.

3) The Everything Machine: The Everything Machine app encourages children to create virtual machines on-screen. It’s a digital sandbox that may inspire kids to delve deeper into microelectronics in the real world. The app also has online resources for parents and children including a PDF manual and a YouTube channel to spark ideas. It’s free for ios and Android.

4) Endless Wordplay: Endless Wordplay is an app that brings together rhyming word puzzles and animated sequences that will have children and parents alike laughing while playing this game. This app is structured into lessons build on word-building and sentence structure success. It’s free for ios and Android.

5) Tynker: The Tynker app aims to introduce children to computer programming. This is done by way of a series of coding lessons and by dragging and dropping blocks of code into place, and running the results to see what happens. There’s also a fun function to teach kids how drones are constructed. Some of its puzzles are free, while others are sold in packs via in-app purchase.

6) Hopster: The Hopster app is a very modern attempt to turn the act of watching tv into a purely fun and academic hobby. It’s like an educational broadcasting network for kids. There’s a $3.99-a-month subscription service with a big selection of cartoons, lessons, language programs, and shows. Many of which focus on learning games including phonics, letter-tracing, and creative tasks.

7) Safari Tales: Safari Tales is an app that makes learning literacy skills fun through creative play featuring animals of the African savannah. While playing, kiddos use a word wheel to ask questions about what they see, practicing their sentence construction and then turn their lessons into digital storybooks that encourage more reading. It’s free for ios and Android.

8) Cursive Writing Wizard: This handwriting app isn’t intended to replace the important physical pencil-practice that children need when learning to write. Rather a complement to it, reinforcing letter shapes and joined-up writing. It’s also very customizable as you can enter your own word lists for your children to trace the letters of familiar words, names, and signage. It’s free for ios and Android.

9) Duolingo: Want your kiddos to learn new languages for free? Then Duolingo is for you! With this app, users are given bite-sized lessons to simply and effectively learn foreign languages including French, Spanish, Irish, Portuguese, and many others. This free app will give kiddos the ability to learn languages in an interactive way that feels more like play than learning. It’s free for ios and Android.

Also during our trip, as a family, we were able to watch a free family movie on VUDU** in our hotel room. Because with the $49.88 TRULY Unlimited Talk, Text, & Data plan customers receive a free VUDU** movie rental credit valued at $7.00 each time they renew their service. Now with this new plan, we can look forward to having an extra family movie night each month too!

All-in-all, we had a blast this past weekend! Some of the highlights of last week’s trip included visiting our state’s aviation museum to tour military plane models, rocket construction modules, robotic modules, STEM learning modulation simulation, and even a lecture on how to bring robotics into your child’s classroom and home. For my husband, a public educator and Robotics coach, this was a trip to remember!

Friends, I encourage you to check out this plan from Walmart Family Mobile. Our summer adventure got a whole lot better thanks to Walmart Family Mobile and your next trip can too! Now I have to ask, where will you head for your next summertime trip? Or do you have suggestions for essential back-to-school apps for the kids this coming academic year? I’d love to hear about them both below!

Disclaimer: All prices for phones and plans included in this post are accurate as of the date of posting; however, these prices are subject to change. Please refer to this page or your local Walmart for current pricing
◊Does not include tethering. Video typically streams at DVD quality. During congestion, the top 3% of users (>32GB/mo.) may notice reduced speeds due to deprioritization. Please always refer to the latest terms and conditions at myfamilymobile.com.
**Limited time offer. Available for lines active with the PLUS $49.88 plan only. VUDU enabled device and account required for digital viewing. Customers must be 18 years or older to open a VUDU account. Movie rental is only available in the USA. Free movie rental provided in the form of a movie rental code to the value of a $7.00 VUDU credit. Movie rental code allows for selection from available movies for rent. May not be readily redeemable on all new releases. Code will be delivered within up to 24 hours of the effective account renewal date. Must be used within 30 days of receiving code. Offer is non-transferable. Limit 1 per customer. Additional terms and conditions on VUDU’s website: http://www.vudu.com/termsofservice.html