The ELSA apps

Patterns and Relationships

App Bundle One

ELSA Patterns and Relationships is the first children’s app bundle for the ELSA program.

It includes four individual apps: Photo Story, Lunch Boxes, Let’s Decorate and Let’s Dance.

Patterns and relationships are valuable topics for children to explore, as it helps them understand their world. Exploring relationships between objects gives children new ways to consider relationships between people. In ELSA’s Patterns and Relationships app bundle, children engage with STEM Practices while ordering a story, sorting food, patterning with colourful animals and objects, and representing a dance with symbols.

Core concepts: sorting, ordering, patterning and representing. (Note: This app bundle works on tablets only.)

Location and Arrangement

App Bundle Two

ELSA Location and Arrangement is the second children’s app bundle.

It includes four individual apps: Little Helpers, Hide and Seek, Playground and Directions.

Location and arrangement are natural concepts for children as they engage with their world. Children relish opportunities to experience, observe and describe positions, directions, people, places and things. In the ELSA Location and Arrangement app bundle, children engage with STEM Practices while moving objects and using positional language, hiding and finding animated animal cards, arranging playground equipment on a map, and following directions to navigate through a zoo.

Core concepts: position, location, arrangement, orientation. (Note: This app bundle works on tablets only.)

Representations

App Bundle Three

ELSA Representations is the third children’s app bundle.

It includes four individual apps: Let’s Make Musical Instruments, Let’s Play In A Band, Let’s Dress For Our Celebration, and Let’s Make Sounds.

Representations provide powerful ways for children to express their understandings using language, pictures and symbols. Exploring how objects can be represented gives children new insights into how others’ view the world and communicate these views. In the ELSA Representations app bundle, children engage with STEM Practices while making musical instruments, playing music in a band, creating and recording sounds for their musical instruments, and helping choose the right clothes to match the weather.

Core concepts: decoding, encoding, conditionals, debugging. (Note: This app bundle works on tablets only.)

Investigations

App Bundle Four

ELSA Investigations is the fourth children’s app bundle.

It includes four individual apps: Let’s Tinker With Spare Parts, Let’s Look For Clues, Let’s Find The Missing Animal, and Let’s Create More Animal Clues.

Young children are born investigators. They poke and prod whatever they discover, and they delight in learning new skills and developing new understandings about their world. Investigations help children develop inquiry skills while supporting their natural curiosity. In the ELSA Investigations app bundle, children engage with STEM Practices while building pipes to allow water to flow into a veggie patch, matching evidence to a particular animal, using tools to find hidden insects, and creating their own evidence for use in the app.

Core concepts: observing, proposing, verifying, explaining. (Note: This app bundle works on tablets only.)

Educator App

The ELSA Educator app has been designed to help educators run the ELSA Program in their centre or classroom. It contains more than 100 off-app activities that you can do inside or outside, as well as examples of our Experience, Represent, Apply (ERA) learning cycle. The ELSA Educator app allows educators to create classes and children’s profiles, monitor children’s progress via their invdividual profiles and approve content that children have created using the ELSA children’s apps.

This app works on tablets and smartphones.

Families Web App

The ELSA Families Web App provides parents and carers with plenty of great STEM-based activities they can do with children at home, outside in the yard or while out and about. 

There are so many ways to engage with STEM at own home while going about day-to-day life. After all, so much goes on in a family home – in the bathroom, the kitchen, the laundry and the play area. Parents can search the ELSA Families Web App for activities to help children explore ELSA’s STEM Practices and concepts in different areas of their home, yard and neighbourhood.

This web app works on web browsers on computers, tablets and smartphones.