November + December Issue
2012
Tis the Season… Do you like Christmas music? I LOVE Christmas music and I start to listen to it in October. I’ve discovered a few other crazies like me that like to get their inner jingle on early in the season.
Apps For Your Inner Jingle
Christmas Music ~ 10,000 FREE Christmas Songs
The Holiday Season Decorate your tree with music! GlowTunes Christmas –free lets you decorate a tree with beautiful lights that glow and play unique melodies!
Tap a Tune – free
Designed for children ages 2 and up, Mindshapes’ TapA-Tune builds musical confidence and provides valuable learning (hand-eye coordination, exposure to different rhythms, instruments and tones).
Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas! It’s hard to believe that we are in the holiday season (or as I call it “the eating season”) already! I’ve curated some of the most amazing apps to share with you. Last month I was meeting with a few colleagues to share apps and we were confounded with the sheer amount of free apps that were so powerful and engaged our students in such a variety of ways. What a great time to be a SLP and to be fortunate enough to have an iPad to use in therapy! I hope you enjoy this Holiday edition but most of all I hope you enjoy this special time of the year with your family, friends and students. Cheers! Melissa
Let’s Talk Turkey: Thanksgiving Coloring Book App! The Thanksgiving Coloring Book app is the best coloring book, finger painting, finger coloring app in the app store. It will keep your kids entertained for hours. The unique features found in this app will make any kid, or adult, feel like a coloring rockstar! This will only be offered for free for a short time so get it while you can. Use the unique color in the lines feature to make professional looking pictures - Shake your device to clear the picture and start over. - Zoom in and out to color those small spaces - Over 60 colors to choose from - Save your pages to the gallery, the photo album or email them - Use our paint bucket tool to easily color beautiful pictures - Tons of pages to color - Color your own photos from the photo album - Share your page with others on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr - - Work with iPhone, iPod, iPad and retina displays
Here’s a way to use this app in therapy: have the students answer “wh” questions about Thanksgiving dinner below and follow the directions using the turkey coloring page on the iPad. 1. If you like gravy on your mashed potatoes, color a feather brown. If you don’t like gravy on your potatoes then color a feather green. 2. If you like white turkey meat color a feather blue but if you like dark turkey meat color a feather orange. 3. If you stay at home for Thanksgiving dinner, color his beak yellow but if you go to somebody’s house for Thanksgiving dinner then color his beak orange. 4. If you like cranberries color a feather dark brown but if you don’t like cranberries then color a feather dark green. 5. If you like pumpkin pie for dessert, then color his legs yellow but if you like apple pie for dessert then color his legs red.
You can add more questions to complete the coloring page!
Apps to “Gobble” Up! Hand Turkey - free Tracing your fingers on a sheet of paper is so... 20th century. This Thanksgiving, place your hand on your iPad to magically create your very own hand turkey and decorate him. Lorrie Ann Harrington originally created this Thanksgiving story to teach her son, who has Autism Spectrum Disorder, new vocabulary, language-based concepts, and social communication skills. She found that incorporating his interests, including photographs of him in the stories, helps him to stay engaged and relate to the teaching topic more easily. This eBook focuses on the “WH” question “WHERE?”, punctuation, and gender-based pronouns. The question “Where?” is used repeatedly throughout the book as well as other concepts including, gender-based pronouns, punctuation, and more. In addition, the story is structured in such a way that it can be used to help teach children to identify, label, and categorize words, by commenting on the text and pictures.
Factoid #346: 45 million turkeys are eaten each Thanksgiving.
Tell a story with the
ScrapPad App Thanksgiving Picture Book
This app would be great to use with students to tell a story using the stickers as characters or make a person into a pilgrim and add text. The Thanksgiving version is free and the full ScropPadversion is $4.99 cents for over 2,000 elements across all
Photos of your Thanksgiving celebration will look GREAT in a scrapbook and it's FUN, EASY and FAST to create quality layouts with ScrapPad. Use your fingers to touch, drag, pull, plop and pinch your layout to just the way you want it. It only takes a minute to create a cool page design to share with your friends and family. If you scrap and have an iPad, you NEED ScrapPad. This FREE Thanksgiving version is a great way to see what we're all about. Features: • Fun 'Give Thanks' kit. • Simple, easy to use interface. • Use photos from your iPad photo library. • Custom text editor. • Create unlimited scrapbook albums! • Create unlimited pages! • Upload pages to Facebook. • Share your work easily by email. • Print from within the app with AirPrint.
Sound Gecko Listen to any article on the web! Wow! This service just blows my mind, talk about universal access for everyone! This is a great tool called SoundGecko and allows you to listen to any article on the web. It is a free text-toaudio transcribing web service that allows users to easily listen to any article on the go. The way SoundGecko works is very simple and easy. Just head over to its homepage
and paste in the URL of the article you want to convert into audio and provide a valid email address and SoundGecko will instantly send you the MP3 file of that article. SoundGecko has also several other cool features that it provides for its users such as connecting your Google Drive or
Dropbox account to it and it will automatically place a copy of the MP3 audio file on your cloud drive. It also works on any device and has an iPhone app if you want to listen to articles on the go. There is also a Chrome extenson for SoudGeck to install on your toolbar.. The speech is a little fast but pretty good for synthesized speech. There is a free Sound Gecko app too.
Me Share? Well ok, maybe an app or two‌.
Interactive apps that celebrate the season through speaking, listening, singing, drawing, eating and writing.
I Luv Drawing Santa - free My Occupational Therapist friends love this one!
This app is so cool and our Occupational Therapist friends will love it too. By tracing over lines in progressive steps, children can draw 9 different characters from Santa to a gingerbread man. They can then color them in and print them out or email them.
Yummy Christmas - free Simple little recipes to make Christmas goodies. Some of the ingredients I’d change like the one with sour cream!
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Educators love checklists and rubrics to analyze things. There are many, many checklists on the web and occasionally you come across one that you like or could adapt to your needs. I kind of like this one from Vicki Windman.
Checklist for Special Needs iPad Apps Special Needs App Name: IEP Goals: Common Core Standards:
Ease of use Can be used independently Connects to the Common Core Standards Matches IEP Goals Tracks student data Tracks progress Allows more than one student to use app Has different levels to meet individual student needs Has audio capability for reading apps or directions Allows teachers to add their own content Will not move levels unless a passcode is provided Can be passcoded for confidentiality Provides verbal praise Does not use red x’s Ability to contact developer
Can record students when working on fluency Allows for student manipulation Offers a free or limited version to evaluate Skills are reinforced and connected to an IEP Goal or CSS Gives student feedback Uses real voices rather than computerized voices Not too distracting- either with colors or music Allows user to save work Note taking apps: Assist in executive functioning skills
Enable Talk You have to check this out. It’s a glove that a deaf person wears and the sensors in it pickup the finger spelling movement and converts it into audible words which are played through an iPod, phone or iPad. http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/16/smart-gloves-turnsign-language-gestures-into-vocalized-speech/
What is Cross Apping? Cross apping is the use of several different apps to scaffold, support and extend learning opportunities across one theme with diverse learners. Apps are used with each other, sometimes 2 or 3 concurrently and in a specific sequence. A lot of people ask me “what can the iPad do for me?” when really they should be asking the question, “what can I do with an iPad? So let’s grab the iPad and “DO SOMETHING!” I am doing a 45 minute presentation at the beginning of November about Cross Apping at the Inclusive Best Practice Summit and these are the apps I will be talking about in my presentation. The topic is RECYCLING. With Cross Apping there is something for everyone.
Read Something: Sustainability book app by Verga Sistemas – free
Peep and the Big Wide World Trash Stash – free
SoundGecko App - free (allows you to copy the URL of an article then paste it into the field on the app and it will send an MP3 audio file to your email. You simple click on it and it will read you the article from the website. Remember to hit the purple “reader” button beside the web address in the toolbar. This allows you to read just the text on the website without all of the competing ads and visually distracting gook. Go to the Paper University Website to get student centered informational articles about paper: www.tappi.org/paperu/
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Watch Something: This is about a 4 minute video on how paper products are recycled. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=5gWv _bkq7UI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv %3D5gWv_bkq7UI
Brainstorm Something: Idea Sketch – free. Idea Sketch lets you easily draw a diagram mind map, concept map, or flow chart - and convert it to a text outline, and vice versa. Use this app to create a mind map about “What’s in Your Garbage?”
Create Something: Corkulous app $1.99 – Create a virtual corkboard about recycling or natural resources or about a robot made from recycled parts. Read a book about recycling and then create a board about what happened in the story. PicCollage free – pick out different materials and assign them to students (example – metal, paper, plastic, wood) and then have them create a collage page with different examples of things that can be recycled that are made up of that material. Students could also pick an item and show and tell with pictures and text what can be recycled out of it (example: rubber tires turned into a track to walk on).
Report Something: Write a script about the importance of recycling and how it effects our environment if we don’t recycle then create a puppet show using the Puppet Pals app – free but Director’s Pass is $2.99 (I highly recommend getting the Director’s Pass). Take the robot you made in the Toca Boca Robot Lab and turn him into a puppet character. Create a commercial about what types of things can be recycled.
Sort something: Recycle Hero app - .99 cents - Allows you to sort garbage into different recycle bins and accumulate money for it.
Tomra Game app -free – Arcade game where you, as a sorting controller, are put to the test to distribute empty bottles to different destinations depending on shape and material.
Infer Something:
Sequence Something: Making Sequences app$4.99 Watch the YouTube video about how paper is recycled and then draw 5 pictures about how it is done. Take pictures of them with the iPad and create a sequence, add an explanation under each one and then challenge your classmates to put them in order.
Retell Something: Videolicious – free Take those pictures that the students drew about recycling paper after watching the YouTube video and turn them into a mini movie by recording what is happening in each picture to retell the story of how the paper is made.
Demonstrate & Explain Something: Recycling Moo – free for lite version, paid version .99 cents Chimp scientists have brought you a Moo that can save the world from garbage by eating anything to make electricity! In this hilarious puzzle game that's fun for all ages, figure out what your Moo craves and avoid an allergic reaction. Easy to play, difficult to master! It’s utter madness and fun!
The Educreations app – free. Use this app to demonstrate a concept such as deforestation while drawing a picture or drawing over a picture and recording your voice explaining. You can then save it and play it back. Explain the difference between flora and fauna or explain how plastic bottles hurt sea life and birds.
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Build Something: Toca Boca Robot Lab app - $1.99 – create a robot from recycled parts and then guide him through a maze to collect stars and get to the giant magnet at the top of the screen. Take a screen shot of the robot and use him in a Corkulous corkboard and label what his different parts used to be, for example an old garden hose for an arm.
Define Something:
Take the vocabulary from the ebook app Sustainability and define it through the WordSalad app – free with watermark or paid is .99 cents. Don’t know what the word means? Go to the free Merriam Webster app and look it up. WordSalad is like Wordle where you make a word cloud. Type the main word 4 times and it will remain bigger than all of the other words. Open up the Note app and type in the main word along with other words that help to define or describe it then copy all of the text go back into the WordSalad app and touch “from clipboard” and boom! It can now be sent in an email or converted into a pdf file and printed out.
Play Something: Trash Chaos – free for lite version or $3.99 for paid version Defend the earth by picking up trash and placing it in the correct plastic or organic garbage bins while also vaporizing the little aliens and collecting coins.
Make Something: Yes, put down the iPad and make something with your actual hands, I promise it will be fun and slightly messy. Pintrest app - Search “Melissa Ustik” and I have a board called “Recycled Crafts” with ideas to make crafts with recycled objects…..not my ideas just ones I pilfered off the web! You can also search “kids crafts” and come up with about a 4 million ideas.
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Bake Something
Cookie Party .99 cents - Cookie Party includes over 300 cookie recipes. The app is attractive and fun to use. Where else can you get that many recipes for .99 cents?!
Christmas Cookies…..Yum! I don’t know about you but I’ve never met a Christmas cookie I didn’t like! From baking and eating them to creating virtual cookies on the iPad, I embrace the holidays season by gaining at least 5 pounds! I’ve mixed together some apps for therapy with some apps for you to use and possibly bake a few yummy treats. Toca Tea Party - .99 cents Invite your friends to
a tea party around your iPad! Set the table, choose your favorite cookies and cakes, serve the tea and you’re good to go! Simply eat and drink with your finger! With Toca Tea Party, you can play together with your kids in a way that stimulates their imagination. This is a really nice interactive app for preschool to 2nd graders. The graphics are super and the Toca apps are quality. One of my favorites!
Here’s a video for the Toca Tea Party App.
Cookulus This app is .99 cents. It has more than 5200 unique chocolate chip cookie recipes with the touch of a finger. That’s just crazy talk!!!! Who knew there were so many recipes for chocolate chip cookies.
Christmas Cookie Maker – free No oven? No cookies? No problem! Bake your own Christmas cookies with Christmas Cookie Maker!
Mmmm, Do I Smell Gingerbread? The Talking Gingerbread Man – free
The funniest, most delicious biscuit wants to ensure you have a very happy Christmas. TALKING GINGERBREAD MAN!!
The Gingerbread Man : Musical Storybook- free Meet the very first
Musical Storybook [The Gingerbread Man]. Sing along the theme song “Can you run?” and listen to the exciting story.
The Gingerbread Man Lite by Read and Record – free; in app purchase $1.99 A beautifully illustrated story that allows parents and children to become the storytellers. The reader's voice can be recorded over each scene, to listen to time and time again. Give your child a love for reading with the bond of your voice.
Focus on MH: Functional Living Apps Providing functional therapy for high school MH students can be a challenge as it is difficult to find apps that are at a lower level and age appropriate. Here are a few apps that can provide practice with functional living skills: Learn My Info - $3.99 With each card they will write their info twice. Tracing first with guidance and writing each character again without the visual aid. 10 cards allow practice and repetition learning the following critical information:
-First Name -Last Name -Mother’s Name -Father’s Name -Phone Number -Birthday -Street Address City -State -Zip Code Cards are presented in a game format to encourage simultaneous fun and learning. Trace and write modes for each card enables competency. Positive Reinforcers and Correction Procedures are included. 10 trials allow for easy data collection. Multiple user profiles allows classroom based educators and therapists to utilize with 20+ students. Built in screen capture tool allows you to save for data collection. Take new photos or upload them from your iPad and recording and playback of voice allows for multi-sensory learning.
Next Dollar Up - $1.99 is a widely utilized special education teaching strategy for those with special needs to develop independence in money management using a whole dollar amount concept. It involves looking at an item price and rounding up to the next dollar to make the purchase.
Functional Apps for MH Students ChoiceBoard Creator – free It is the perfect app for creating customizable choice boards for the unique needs of individuals with communication challenges. It reinforces correct choice by expanding the selected image as well as playing the customized auditory rewards. It is an excellent tool to train and prepare users for more sophisticated communication devices via an easy, simple-touse choice-making platform. The possibilities are
Social HD – free This sampler includes 62 of the most common topics in the Functional Social Skills System. Included in the program are the topics of meeting/greeting people, taking responsibility, being polite and courteous, joining others in groups, apologizing/excusing self, following directions and handling criticism. •Contains 7 categories with a total of 62 videos.
Safety Signs and Words HD - .99 cents This program covers 80 of the most common safety signs and words used in our communities. Knowledge of these signs and words could save a life. Don’t let life be the harsh teacher of these key signs and words. Some of the safety signs and words included in this program are: crosswalk, danger, do not eat, do not touch, fasten your seat belts, keep off, keep out, watch your step, and more.
Functional Apps for MH DialSafe Pro – free Teach your child proper phone usage and safety with an app that lets them actually practice it! DialSafe is designed to teach these critical skills in a kid friendly manner through the use of animated lessons, skill building games, practice sessions, and even a realistic phone simulator.
Amazing Coin(USD) FREE: Money learning & counting game for kids – free 8 interactive games about USD coins learning, counting, paying, making change, matching and etc.
Telling Time - Photo Touch Game - .99 A very comprehensive app for telling time in very customizable ways.
Getting young adults ready for the workplace: time management skills app iK Calendar – free
iK is NOT just another calendar application! iK provides an easy and handy way to track and manage all calendar events that you have created on your iPhone/iPad or Mac. So, all the standard Apple calendar features such as alerts will work regardless of whether or not iK is running and without using the Apple Push Notification service. iK displays events around the clock, which is much more intuitive than observing event lists that other applications offer. iK supports multiple calendars, so you can choose to display your work events, your family events, or even both if needed.
Week View Express – free Week View is a straight forward calendar application. It is designed for speed and simplicity.
Awesome Lists - To do + Lists for iPad! – free Awesome Lists a designed as a simple
and elegant solution to all the lists you make. It's uses are only limited by your imagination: to do lists, packing lists, checklists, shopping lists, work inventory, etc….
Jerricho the Elf - free is an interactive activity book from Punflay that has been designed for kids five years and older. The app features a heart-warming holiday tale that comes with 4 super fun activities integrated in the story.
Santa's Big Helper: 9 Christmas Apps in 1 .99 cents
Make yourself into an elf or have your friends make them in a Christmas video and share them. Send your dancers to friends with the app. Take your own photo or use one in your album to put a custom head on a video.

Super Dance Christmas Elf, Reggae Reindeer and Miss Merry Christmas let you dance your head off with Super Dance Christmas Edition.
Feeling Nostalgic?
My Charlie Brown Christmas Tree – free Choose from hundreds of different combinations of trees, ornaments, toppers, stands, and wraps to make your tree the Charlie Browniest tree this holiday! Holiday Time Machine – free WATCH OVER 2,500 HAND-PICKED HOLIDAY VIDEOS FROM 1898 TO 2011 Select a year and watch amazing holiday television, commercials, music, trailers, and more! Internet connection needed. I love this app because I get to relive my childhood music and TV memories!
Presents for you… free ebooks Teeny Tuca – The Roosters’ Race The first adventure of Teeny Tuca is The Roosters’ Race. A charming tale by its characters, interactivity, lessons and all messages of motivation, determination, friendship and affection. The Rag Farm is going bankrupt. Mr. Willy, Rag Farm’s owner, has a huge debt with Mr.Tony Black. However, there is still some hope left for the Rag Farm: win the big gold corncob from the Roosters’ Race.
AMAZING FACTOID # 234: About 40 million apps are downloaded every day!
There are a lot of free children’s ebooks out there but the task of sorting though the good ones and the not so good oneds can be a time consuming task so when you download a really good one you do feel like you just got a gift.
Millie Was Here: Book 1
Meet Millie, the adorable but mischievous mutt who turns real life into a real adventure. Tap and swipe each page to discover why Millie is such a special dog. Her silly "super powers," her outrageous "special diet," and her wacky “disguises" are all revealed in this full-featured mini book.
The Land of Me: Story Time Create your own stories by choosing the hero, the theme and how it ends then see it come alive before your eyes! ★ Change the words to instantly alter the storyline as it plays out in front of you ★ Designed by child development experts for young children to explore their creativity ★ On-screen hints offering endless ideas for discussion and things to do ★ Listen as Granny Olive, a turtle of indeterminable age, tells tales about wolves, bravery and things that go bump in the night!
Astrid and Siri Astrid and Siri is the story of an Arctic girl who, with the help of her magical purple thread, creates clothing for her Arctic animal friends. Follow Astrid and her best friend, Siri, through the design process, where they use wool from the Sheep family to make clothing. But with winter approaching what will Astrid do for the Sheep?
The Astrid and Siri website:
http://www.astridandsiri.com/
Lazzo Squiggles! A child’s simple hand-drawn squiggle can become a bird’s nest, rocket smoke, cotton candy, sheep’s wool, a curly beard, and more! Simply squiggle away to complete Lazoo’s internationally award-winning art. Then hit the GO button and watch drawings soar, pulsate, move, twirl, and multiply.
Really Cool eBooks for a Fee….. Slice of Bread Goes to the Beach $2.99 Slice of Bread loves nothing more than hunting for treasure but his day on the beach does not turn out at all the way he'd planned. In a series of unfortunate mishaps, his day goes from bad to worse until he finds a treasure of a very different kind. Slice of Bread goes to the Beach has been specially written, illustrated and voiced for the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch by Glenn Melenhorst, and combined with Jellybiscuits' technical excellence has once again created an interactive experience to delight both young and old.
Food Fight $3.99; lite for free Food fight is a wonderfully bright original story which tells the story of Tim, a boy from earth and Sammy, a sausage from somewhere else altogether. They meet and instantly dislike each other, but are they so different after all? As they work through their differences, Tim and Sammy deal with issues of one-sidedness, prejudgement, food intolerance and ultimately, conflict resolution all in a light heated, fun story.
The Artifacts $2.99 Gr 4-9-This is an interactive story about an imaginative 13-yearold boy who invents ways to entertain himself even when deprived of stimulus. Asaf is a collector of objects and treasures, a finder of gems that other people might consider trash. When his parents, exasperated by his clutter, leave behind his collections when the family moves, he is at first sad, but then begins to collect anew–amassing words, ideas, and facts until his mind becomes his treasure vault. In order to find dialogue and explore Asaf’s thoughts and surroundings, readers must experiment with tapping and tilting, stroking and shaking. Not all enhancements are intuitive, giving the app experience a welcome exploratory quality.
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Spreading Christmas Cheer… one app at a time Holly – A Christmas Tale HD- free Grab a cup of cocoa, put on your favorite Yuletide music and play Holly: A Christmas Tale Deluxe, a wonderful new Hidden Object game guaranteed to fill you with the spirit of the season! As you help Santa find the items he needs to complete his rounds on Christmas Eve, you`ll be asked to pick out toys on a shelf crammed with merchandise, spot the differences between two seemingly identical pictures and more! Download this dazzling new holiday classic today!
Toca Christmas Hair Salon – free Grow, cut, style and Santa’s beard and hair. There is also an animated Christmas tree to decorate and trim. This app is so much fun. Another quality app from the Toca Boca folks.
Jan Brett’s The Night Before Christmas -$4.99 Jan Brett’s exquisite interpretation of The Night Before Christmas literally comes to life in this deluxe app that includes beautifully animated versions of her classic art, playful interactive elements on every spread, and an Autoplay version with original music performed by the Boston Pops Orchestra, and text read by Audie and Grammy award-winning narrator of Harry Potter, Jim Dale.
DECK THE HALLS When I was little we would gather at my aunt Dede’s house for Thanksgiving dinner around noon and then that night we would climb the stairs to the dusty attic to retrieve the very large cardboard box of Christmas lights. My aunt lived in an old Victorian house and she decorated around every single window with lights so there had to be about 100 strings of lights in that giant box. She would strip the masking tape off the top flaps reach down in the box and pull out one super ball of tangled lights (organizational skills were not her strong suit) and proclaim, “let’s go get some Pepsi and eat a little cold stuffing before we tackle this”! Three to four hours later we were half sick from leftovers but the lights were untangled and formed neat little piles all over the living room. I loved helping her decorating her tree and windows and they are some of my most treasured Christmas memories. This curated list of apps honors “decking those halls”!!!! Have fun decorating this year and enjoy that cold stuffing and Pepsi!
Christmas Tree Maker free
Christmas Tree Decorator .99 cents
Decorate Christmas Tree –
Christmas Music Trees – Free – view beautiful trees from around the world
Tiny Stocking Stuffers: the Preschool Apps Counting Ants – $1.99; lite version free This app features adorable ants that zip around in their cars, while teaching kids the basics of counting in 10 languages. The app automatically rotates through five mini games to keep your toddler engaged while they learn to count. Mini games include: • Count the ducks • Count the fish • Count the fruit • Count the train cars • Find the number. The graphics are quite charming! Check out the counting ants app video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpHGKRTGKYw
Make-n-Match- free is a fun and
educational matching game designed for kids. Play the game with the default cards or build your own matching game by creating cards with your own photos. You can also share score with your friends on Facebook. This is a game with infinite possibilities. So see where your imagination will take you.
Felt - $2.99 Felt Board for the iPad is inspired by actual felt boards used by children, teachers and storytellers worldwide. Create characters by selecting skin color, hair and facial features. Choose from a wide variety of costumes, settings and props for hours of magical make believe play. And because it is an app, the pieces will never get lost.
More tiny tots apps……. Roxie’s Doors - $2.99 You can choose to read this book yourself, or be read to by the author. Find and animate over 90 little things and objects that are hidden behind doors, in drawers and in cabinets. Activate a multitude of funny sounds and increase childrens' vocabulary by searching for object that might be new words for them. Stimulate your kids' curiosity with this fun search-and-find, lift the flaps book which is written in rhyme.
Feed Me! – PencilBot Preschool Learning Center - free This app consists of 1 free sampler and 12 In-App-Purchases (IAPs), each in a specific language. The sampler includes 20 questions in different languages to give you a taste of what the PencilBot Preschool Learning Center offers. This app has really good reviews and really bad reviews so it’s probably good there is a free version to try.
Lil Kitten Shopping Cart Game – free Train your kids to shop and save money while having a lot of fun with Lil' Kitten Shopping Cart Game! In full-color, high-resolution graphics, this new app for iPad will surely be a hit with the little ones as they pick up groceries from supermarket racks and later buy cute little toys with their savings.
Tiny tots with their apps all aglow……. Phone for Kids – All in one activity center for children HD free 30 Fun Filled Educational Games and Activities inside. This app has good reviews but I haven’t used it yet.
Put It Away – free Cleaning a room is an
essential living skill for everyone, but can be particularly difficult for children with special needs. Performing this task on the app exercises category sorting and memory, and can help build confidence in kids with autism or other developmental disabilities to complete the task in real life, which is often a challenge. A key feature of the app is customization. Parents and teachers can configure where each item in the room needs to go. New items and new scenes can also be created from the Photo library or Camera (if supported).
Baby-Chef Lite version free
Sort it Out 1 – lite version free
Let’s Make a Movie
In Hollywood they have that nifty “green screen” that creates amazing special effects and makes it look like someone is flying or walking on the moon. Would you believe you could create videos with your students in front of just about any image from the Eiffel Tower to a swamp to the castle at Disney World for $1.99? Well, it’s true with an app called
Green Screen Movie FX. 8 Ideas for using this app: • Shoot a video in a swamp with the student explaining the life cycle of a frog. • Shoot a video in front of the Roman Coliseum with the student pretending to be a tour guide while giving interesting facts about it. • Take a picture from a children’s book (I’m thinking a picture of a scene from Auntie Claus) and use it as a background like the student is really in the story. Have them tell what is happening at that particular part of the story. • Shoot a video in front of a cross-section of a volcano explaining how/why it explodes. • Shoot a video in at Antarctica explaining how global warming is effecting the ice wildlife (wear a parka and hat for realism) • Shoot a video in front of a map of the United States giving the weather report for today and the 5 day extended forecast. • Take a picture of a page in book and pretend you are a character from that book explaining how you feel (Follow the Drinking Gourd, The Three Little Pigs, The Grinch, Frosty). • Shoot a video in front of a favorite animal and give a report about it.
OH SNAP! I’m a self proclaimed “project junkie” and because of that I love this new Snapguide app I stumbled upon. You know sometimes you just want to know how to do something in the least amount of simple steps with pictures & text and this app lets you do just that. In the first 5 minutes I was on it I learned how to make a stylus from a Q-tip, tape and aluminum foil (sounds like a MacGyver episode); make Spritz Christmas cookies(whoa, they’re all butter!!!!); get ripped without weights (need that one after eating all of those Spritz cookies I’m going to make); and how to make a hypertufa pot (isn’t that a cool word? HYPERTUFA!)
MadLips App $2.99 No, I did not make a typo, it really is MadLips instead of Mad Libs! This sweet little app allows you to take a picture of any animal or person and add your mouth talking on it. Now what seemingly at first glance looks like a fluffy entertainment app can actually be used in some very meaningful ways to promote literacy and language skills.
Make your pictures Superimpose any video over any still photo. Make pets sing and make friends say funny things.
talk! clip your your
Check out this link to see how a homeschooler dad used it with his daughter: http://thehomescool.wordp ress.com/2012/06/01/eric -carle-inspired-madlips/
Don’t forget to watch the video the dad made with his little girl using the MadLips app, it’s too cute!
For Our OT Friends……. I have the great fortune of co-treating with a wonderful COTA named Kellee at one of my schools. Her and I trade apps every Wednesday. We say it’s like Christmas morning every Wednesday when we trade our free apps! Here are some of the apps used for bilateral integration and visual tracking.
Draw-n-Show – free Draw and record all at the same time with this app. Change colors and pencil widths.
ABC 123 Practice Lite – free Learn how to write letters and numbers through tracing them with your fingers.
Stackeo - $1.99 Stackeo is a fantastic game of balancing the blocks. It’s a challenge to arrange the blocks right from the base to the maximum possible formation in a single level.
ConstellaMajor For iPad Free Constella Major is a mindboggling game that will rattle your brain and will make your fingers nimble. Connect all randomly generated stars on the screen and build a constellation.
Make a Scene: Farmyard – free Make a Scene Farmyard uses drag and drop interactions, descriptive audio, fun sound effects and engaging animations to create an entertaining, educational platform.
IMPORTANT! This will be the last iPad magazine I will be emailing to you through my email. I will still be publishing it bi-monthly however you will have to subscribe to it at the www.issuu.com website. My list of people has grown too big for me to manage on my own!
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Hey Northeastern Ohio SLPs, would you like to participate in an all day iPad workshop? Any interest? Shoot me an email at: Tootieu@yahoo.com
If you have an app that you love, please email me and I’ll share it in the next iPad+SLP ezine!
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Merry Christmas!
To subscribe go to: www.issuu.com and type “iPad + SLP” in the search box, when one of the issues comes up click on it and then click on “subscribe” you will then sign up to issuu for free and then whenever I add a new magazine you will be notified through your email.