Poems by Heart is a wonderful app to help students learn and memorize famous poems in a progressive way. The free version includes four poems, and students can add on various upgrades depending on their area or poet of interest. The poems are rated by difficulty level, so students can begin with easier poems and progress to more complex poems. They can read about the poet and choose to hear the poem recited by a male or female. They will progress through five stages to memorize the poem by successively filling in the correct multiple choice words to complete the poem. At every stage, students see the poem in written form and hear it spoken for continuous reinforcement. Students can record themselves reciting the poem. Poetry is an important expressive language technique that enhances children's phrasing in speech, vocabulary, and verbal reasoning, and this app is a wonderful tool to foster those skills.

• Provides sufficient and varied types of practice problems to maximize understanding and generalization of the targeted skill/concept
• Manufacturer claims alignment with Common Core/Known Standards
• Presents educational concepts accurately
• Explains answers so students can learn from mistakes
• Better for teaching the skill to new or struggling learners
• Better for practicing or refreshing the skill
• Skills are practiced through authentic, meaningful problems (not just rote practice)

• Appropriate for a broad age range to use and enjoy
• Subject matter and problems are relevant, interesting and authentic to students
• Visually appealing to children in the target age range
• Provides virtual rewards or incentives after meeting specified goals or objectives
• Provides a "break activity" between academic problem sets
• Offers ongoing, progressive challenge
• Overall - Enjoyable. Given the option, students would choose this option

• Has a free or trial version
• Provides teaching guidance for adults to support the child and set appropriate goals
• Provides an age-appropriate tutorial/first time users can work independently
• Student should be able to use independently after first use
• Has a multi-player option to foster in-person collaboration or cooperation
• Multiple users can save a profile
• Student graduates to the next level or topic only after meeting a benchmark
• Can play without sound and not distract others
• Students can save work between sessions
• Can effectively understand and monitor student's progress (email report or in product)
• Provides options to play in languages other than English/Good for ELL
• Presents information in multiple formats (voice over, pictures and text, etc.)
• Overall - Easy to use

• Anxiety
• Themes that might disturb sensitive students (death, blood, slime)
• Self-regulation
• Promotes purchases or upgrades to students
• Themes that might disturb sensitive students (death, blood, slime)

Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics celebrates classic poetry and challenges you to memorize perennial favorites by master wordsmiths. Memorizing and reciting poems helps you enjoy them at a deeper level, learn them for life, impress your friends, and improve your mind—and Poems By Heart makes it fun, easy, and addictive.

The app features:
-Four free poems, including a love sonnet by Shakespeare (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”) and the classic “Eldorado" by Edgar Allan Poe
-37 poems available in the Poetry Shop (plus the first part of “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”), with new additions every month through the first half of 2014
-Works by Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti, W.B. Yeats, James Weldon Johnson, and eighteen other iconic poets
-Verses of adventure, romance, horror, and more, all carefully selected and edited by the experts at Penguin Classics
-Five difficulty stages and twenty ranks of success

Rack up high scores and achievements on your way to reciting over two dozen poems from heart, with recordings you can share and email to your friends. Each new poem you learn becomes an important part of you who are, and the Huffington Post describes Poems By Heart as “the best poetry app I’ve seen in a while.”
Poems By Heart uses brain-training techniques to make remembering poetry easy and fun – in a fast and responsive game. The National Endowment for the Arts calls the app “smart and beautifully designed, with a skillful blend of iconic poetry, memorization techniques, and great gaming.” Each poem features two new and exclusive dramatic readings, and all-new original art. Kirkus calls Poems By Heart “a sophisticated, wildly addictive tool for avowed poetry lovers.” MacLife recommends Poems By Heart as “a great tool” with a “terrific, animated interface.”

Apple has featured Poems By Heart in New & Noteworthy, in the Books and Education categories, and named it one of Apple's "App Store Best of 2013."