Ipads with kindy at J23

Kindy have been having a great time at Stanhope exploring the new ipads. We were really excited to introduce them to the children and they have had a ball exploring a variety of apps. One concern we had was the care of the ipads, but the kids have been fantastic. Sharing was a biggest issue as there are 116chn to 2 ipads- though this then led to the children creating their own roster, so all is peaceful again!

Puppet pals is by far our most popular app - we have upgraded on one ipad to include the full range of characters and backgrounds (well worth it). Does anyone know if we have to upgrade each ipad separately? When we sync them, the upgrade does not sync as it's bought within the app. This can be quite expensive if it's the case. Has anyone else who has been using puppet pals had any success with this? Some apps we have been playing around with are:

Brain Pop- lots of info, quizzes, animated movies etc. Too hard for kindy but would be great for stage 2+

Draw Free- writing sight words, sentences, handwriting, letter formation

Pocket Phonics- great for sounds and letter recognition as many readers use this font. Not fantastic when you are teaching letter formation as it isn't in foundation print.

Farm Flip- a fun memory game (we are learning about the farm this term.

My First Tangrams- four different activities that use tangrams- chn really like this one.

K-3 sight words- we play this in partners to challenge each other. Lots of levels, so a good range of words.

Chalkboard- empty board for writing - this one is good as it picks up the curve of each letter.

Draw it- freestyle, graph paper, notepaper. We tried this one in maths - was a little difficult. Will try this one again when we get a whiteboard connector to see if it's any easier.

We have found the enthusiasm to be amazing and shouldn't have been surprised at the children's ability to work out how each app works.

If anyone has any apps suitable for kindy, we would love to hear from you. We would like to use them more for reading, so are looking forward to finding more suitable apps.