App: Fun Timer for Parents
Price: Free (to start)
Knowledge
The application I decided to use for my classroom management is a kid's timer called Fun Timer for Parents. It's a free app in which you can program the timer to seconds, minutes, hours and the app will start making the beginning of an animal. When the timer is done, the animal is complete! You can also choose music to go along with it!
So, from the images above, you can see that I set the timer to 30 minutes. At the end of the 30 minutes, a picture of a tiger appeared.
This is a free app; however, you can only choose between the tiger and lion for the animal picture. In order to get more animals and music, you have to pay $2.99. It also has ads between each time you use the timer. Again, in order to get rid of this you need to pay.
Application
I have actually been using this application at home with my 4 year old son. We have a hard time eating our dinner in 30 minutes or less. My son will do anything to prolong dinner, to try and get out of eating it. (But he knows no dinner means no special treat). Dinner was taking an hour or more! So, after our class on classroom management, I decided to try this at home first. Guess what, it worked! Children his age do not understand the concept of time yet. You can say, "You get 10 more minutes to eat dinner." But, children truly do not understand how long (or short) 10 minutes is.
This timer worked great the first time we tried it. I briefly described what the app was going to do and then I let him pick which animal to make (tiger or lion). At first, he was a little anxious and kept saying, "When will the tiger be done?" But after about 5 minutes, he just quietly ate his dinner and kept looking at the timer to see what the picture looked like.
I would use this timer with my preschoolers, focusing on rest time. At my school, we have about an hour long rest time where the students can choose to take a nap or read quietly and rest on their mats. Many students get antsy and ask multiple times when rest time will be over or when they can get up. It gets very frustrating and tedious for the teachers to keep saying the same things over and over again. "Not yet." "10 more minutes." "When I say it is time to get up..." Again, children this age do not understand the concept of time. So, in comes the timer app! I would love to try and use it with my students for them to get a better understanding of how long rest time is and what is expected of them. Hopefully, they will get the concept of looking at the ipad and not asking us constantly when rest time is over!
Reflections in Practice
I think this app would be great for preschool teachers to use not only for rest time but for other times during the day as well. Snack time, lunch, clean up, etc. could all use the timer app to help time management and efficiency.
I'm not a big fan of only getting 2 animals for the free app and having to pay to get more. I think it would be beneficial to have multiple animals to use so the children don't get bored!
