App Review: Ice Is Nice!: All About the North and South Poles - Teaching Children About the Life in North and South Pole

Ice Is Nice!: All About the North and South Poles – Teaching Children About the Life in North and South Pole

Posted on August 3, 2012

The interactive pages, great narration, highlighted words, glossary words, and sound effects make Ice is Nice! a great omBook for hooking your child into both learning and reading! This book is a great asset for the classroom or to help any child get (more) interested in science!

Reviewed by ElementaryTeacher

Details

The Cat in the Hat Learning Library is a great resource to introduce inquisitive young minds with basic science concepts. Ice is Nice! allows readers to join The Cat in the Hat, Thing 1, and Thing 2 on their tour of the North and South Poles in the SS Ice Chopper.

During this journey, the reader (of any age, but geared towards kids age 5-8) can learn about the geography of the Poles as well as the animals that live within them. Besides animals, the reader can learn about glaciers and even see icebergs as they splash into the sea.

Like other Oceanhouse Media omBooks, there is plenty of interaction between the reader and the book. At the North Pole, one can interact with diagrams showing how the Earth orbits the sun and rotates on its own axis. And this concept allows a reader to understand how day, night, and seasons are created. The omBook also explains how a polar bear can keep warm even in below zero temperatures. One can find out which animals camouflage themselves, and why some animals migrate.

Then it’s time venture along with the characters onto the South Pole. Here, readers can learn about continental land mass, the different species of penguins and how they survive and live within their habitat here. The omBook ends by talking about climate change and that scientists are studying this concept to understand why climate change is occurring in the first place.

The app has two different ways to experience the story: “Read It Myself” is just like a traditional book with added background sounds and “Read to Me” highlights the words as it is narrated.

Oceanhouse Media does a great job at combining the original text and artwork of Dr. Seuss, yet providing extras, such as touching a picture to hear and see what that picture is of. You also can replay an entire paragraph if interested. The highlighted words feature is great for early readers. And Oceanhouse Media has included words in bold type in the book Ice Is Nice! These bold words, such as glaciers, icebergs, axis, orbit and adaptation when tapped, a pop-up of the full glossary entry appears.

What ElementaryTeacher Liked

Ice Is Nice! is another good addition to The Cat in the Hat Learning Library. The love for reading is successful in this nonfiction story due to rhyme, great narration, animation, and educational information. From a teaching standpoint, this book was great in teaching all about life on the North and South Poles. So even if your children/students are not science fans, they can become one after reading this book.