Meet the Insects: Water & Grass Edition
By Debbie Gorrell,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Interactive resource packed with content for nature lovers.
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Meet the Insects: Water & Grass Edition
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What’s It About?
The home page is organized into five main areas for kids to explore: Multimedia, Insect Story, Observation Journal, See Insects, and Quiz. The Multimedia section includes brief videos and photographs of different insects, giving kids a close-up view of behaviors like swimming, hiding from predators, and laying eggs. The videos are quite brief, but they seem to give just enough information to keep younger kids interested. The Insect Stories section a chapter book with topics including classification, life cycles, and characteristics of insects. Kids can listen to narration as they read text at the bottom of the screen. The Observation Journal includes a section for kids to enter written observations and upload photographs, and a section for them to draw pictures of their observations. The See Insects section includes more detailed information about the five main groups of water and grass insects, and the Quiz section offers kids an opportunity to test their knowledge by taking either a true/false quiz or a quiz in which they identify insects based on a photograph.
Is It Any Good?
Similar to the other Meet the Insects apps, MEET THE INSECTS: WATER & GRASS EDITION is filled with fun facts, solid content, beautiful graphics, and diverse media resources. Insects come to life at the tap of a finger, and kids will be inspired to go outside and explore these critters in real life. The built-in zooming magnifying glass is a fun and easy way for kids to observe detailed structures of the insects. It would be great to see a pause and rewind feature in the Insect Story section so kids can review the material and/or take notes, and providing videos for each insect would provide consistency for kids who will want to see the same features for each bug. Aside from these small shortcomings, the app provides every possible angle to get kids interested in insects.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about insects that live in water and grass. How do they travel? How are they different than other insects?
Families can go outside and explore! Try to find and identify insects that kids learned about from the app.
Families can work together to create a hand-illustrated field guide of insects.
Talk about how animals (and insects) are classified by species, genus, family, order, etc. or do some research online about classification and naming.
App Details
- Device: iPad
- Subjects: Science : animals, biology
- Skills: Thinking & Reasoning : applying information, collecting data, Self-Direction : academic development
- Pricing structure: Paid
- Release date: September 4, 2013
- Category: Education
- Topics: Bugs
- Publisher: NCSOFT
- Version: 1.0.2
- Minimum software requirements: iOS 5.0 or later
- Last updated: July 29, 2016
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