Teachers, Educators & Home Schoolers

“Recommended by Educators” on Google Play for Education, #1 in Amazon.com Education, selected as Editor’s Choice by Children’s Technology Review, 4-Starred by Common Sense, the Heckerty stories have been recommended by everyone from Yahoo to TUAW as well as featured on TV and radio. The many enthusiastic user reviews from around the world speak for themselves.

See for yourself – Download the Apps Here – You’ll be glad you did!!

 

So what’s Heckerty’s magic?

Why are teachers and parents so passionate about Heckerty? It’s because Heckerty is based on the idea that each learning challenge is a game. And each learning discovery must be fun and each child feeling rewarded as he/she progresses and learns.

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Heckerty works on two levels crucial to any educator:

  • The series is designed to stimulate questions and discussion of those life issues important to kids discovering the world each day as they grow up. Educators can guide their children, simultaneously developing essential critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
  • Students enjoy Heckerty as a collection of wonderful stories that keep them laughing. As they enjoy themselves, kids discover the magic of books, building a solid foundation in language and reading.

Heckerty apps run on iOS and Android devices, and new apps come in 15 different languages.

Want to read some of our User Reviews?

Or look through our Media Archive?

 

Formal Lesson Plans for Heckerty Apps & eBooks

Yup, we’ve got them here — one for each Heckerty story … and yes, they’re compatible with Common Core Standards. Get them here and get some creative new ideas on how Heckerty can play well in your classroom.

  • Meet Heckerty lesson plan: Students make connections between ideas of friendship introduced in the text and their own ideas of what makes a good friend.
  • Heckerty Cook lesson plan: Students analyze what makes a healthy meal, create a menu and identify the five food groups.
  • Zanzibar’s Birthday lesson plan: Students develop vocabulary skills, distinguish different word sounds, recognize letter shapes and sounds, and identify colors using Zanzibar’s Birthday.
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Teacher Advisory Panel

Want to be part of our teacher panel? We’d love to have you. Email us and we’ll get you involved and start to send you materials for your kids and classes.  

Activities:

We’re continually developing and creating activities that kids can do all year around — visit our Activities area on the website and you’ll find lots of creative classroom and home projects for your students!! We want to make activities as useful and relevant as possible for your kids and classroom – let us know what you want or need here, or email us at <[email protected]> and we’ll try to make it happen!!

 

Heckerty in your Classroom / Social Media

We love social media and also believe in the power of sharing — after all, classrooms are all about sharing!

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  • Have you found Heckerty useful in your classroom?
  • Done something interesting with Heckerty’s projects, products or characters?
  • Discovered something interesting or have a great tip other teachers or kids would benefit from?

 

Share it with us and we’ll work to get the word out, post it to our blog and give you the credit you deserve! And watch our blog, Twitter feed and other social media for great project ideas for your classes.  

Easy Tips for Heckerty in the Classroom

StoryTeller mode lets students hear the whole story and become comfortable with it. Tap on the images from time to time to help them discover the animations. Then try running the story in Read and Play mode. Let your student hear the whole page by tapping on the Heckerty face icon in the upper right or read the story themselves.

  • When the page is done, encourage your student to tap on a word in the story so they can hear it and see it. If you have purchased our optional Language Helper, you can use it to see the equivalent word in another language that you can choose.
  • Make sure your student discovers the animations by tapping on the images — you’ll find that tapping repeatedly may show other animations — kids love this!

- When your student has explored the page fully, encourage them to go on to the next page by tapping on the broomstick at the bottom right of the page or swiping to the left.
  • Once they know how the story works, let them explore on their own — they can’t break anything or go out onto the Internet!

Watch how they eventually start to build new sentences with the words, even though they can’t read yet.

 

Games to build vocabulary and thinking skills

  • Go to a page and say a word, then ask them to tap on that word — many children are surprisingly quick to make the association between the shape of a written word and when it’s spoken, even if they cannot yet read. This is a great exercise for learning to read!
  • Pick individual words and play a game where you go together to a small dictionary or http://www.dictionary.com to find out what the word means. Then – after a short while – ask them about the word to help them remember it. If they don’t remember, look it up and remind them again. Soon, they’ll start remembering.

One More Thing

As we said, we’d love to hear from you – write us using our Contact page or send email to [email protected].