Elastic AlphabetsĮlastic Alphabets for Kids by Pratik Machchar simply mesmerizes young children with the uncomplicated, easily relatable concept of line drawings. Reader Bee and the Story Tree by Learning Circle Kids LLC takes a wonderful, revolutionary, new approach for beginning readers - you don't want to miss this one! While this app has captured all the charm, whimsy, and nostalgia of first-grade primers, it's been thoroughly researched and executed to maximize a child's first experiences with learning to read. This product offers a unique environment for improving a student's ability to create grammatically correct sentences. The app developer worked diligently perfecting every feature and every conceivable setting. This may sound complicated, but it's not! Rainbow Sentences offers teachers a lot of control, as the interface makes it simple to set up the levels of play. There are three levels of play with 55 sentences each and six levels of sentence complexity. Rainbow Sentences by Mobile Education Store is an incredible learning tool that has a slew of different levels of play and can be adapted for differing students' needs. Basic shapes are presented, as well as color and shade, scale, patterns, and combining shapes into tangrams - much like we combine letters into words. This app also has a quiet elegance that allows children to remain calm and process the material. Identifying, matching, and sorting shapes helps children recognize patterns and is the foundation of decoding.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar - Shapes & Colors by StoryToys is the perfect activity app to help equip any child with the necessary skills for reading readiness. Here are just a few apps to foster reading readiness. Through the use of touchscreen technology, many parents and teachers are watching their children soar socially, emotionally, and academically.
The best of these products are created by passionate individuals with an understanding of what "special" means and how to address these needs. Savvy app developers are making great products to foster reading readiness, many inspired by their own children or students who struggle with learning. How can we use tech to support the special-needs population? Technology has been touted as a game changer for many reasons: personalization, pacing, and embedded assessment tools are just a part of the success. But even when the stage has been set with all the right components, the special-education child usually grapples with reading and writing. Storytelling, print and book awareness, and playing with words (rhyming, clapping, stomping out syllables, rolling and bouncing a ball) are all great ways to get started at an early age. Talking and interacting with children about daily literacy-based activities that interest them in their everyday lives best accomplishes acquiring these skills. In another vein, as Maryanne Wolf writes in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, "We were never born to read." Getting ready to read takes years of informal exposure to language and print in a myriad of ways. Watch Annie Murphy Paul's TED Talk to learn more about what is called fetal origins. But this definition leaves out the concept that reading readiness may actually begin in the womb. What is reading readiness? The dictionary defines it as the point when a child transforms from being a non-reader to being a reader.