Creativity and Fun with iPads!

My class and I have fallen in love with Puppet Workshop! With vibrant colors and unique choices my students never get tired of creating different sock puppets.  The variety of backgrounds to choose from is fun for them too, and they are having a blast making their sock puppets really more of characters in a story.  They are loving it so much so that they are often choosing it during free choice time--that's quite a compliment from my students!

I had a neat connection to this app the other day: we went to our art specialist time and the art teacher was mentioning how it would be a free choice art day.  I overheard and said to her and the class that it would be great if the students would recreate some of the sock puppets they had made on the iPad recently.  I was really just envisioning a crayon drawing that resembled a screen shot of Puppet Workshop.  Much to my surprise when I picked them up ALL of my students had used a variety of materials to create some very fun, intriguing and creative sock puppets! Many of them were not just drawn but cut, glued and embellished.  It was easy to see how much pride they took in their work.  We went back and had an impromptu puppet theater with that day's guided reading books as our scripts-yay for fun learning!

I think as teachers we so often are pushing the academic pieces of technology, that we can forget how important it is for students to visit their creative sides.  Puppet Workshop allows my Kindergarten students the freedom to design, create and share (without the mess and material consumption hassle for me!)  I'm planning on integrating this app into my lesson plans next year, having the students work on the app for awhile and then have a sock puppet theater time where they can bring their creations to life! I'm thinking that those sock puppets would make for some great reading buddies, don't you think?!?!?! Let us know of any other apps or ways you are boosting creativity in your students with iPads!