Ellie's Wings by Danial Sonnenfeld is an awesome app! With six different winged animals to choose from and a varied selection of colors to choose from it makes a great painting app.
With the ability to pick different characters and colors and interactive accents there are tons of possibilities with this app. With each touch of the screen a sound is played and if you drop the paint bucket the character hands you a towel to mop it up with!
Swipe across the wing on the left and it shows up the same on the right wing, never a chance to mess up. The characters interact with you as well as you pick and choose what to put on their wings and then place them on there. With oohs and ahhs and lots of giggles your children are bound to have lots of fun with this app!
As soon as I put this app on my iPad my kids were off and running with it. They all loved it and priced at only 99 cents its a great app with a great price!
We at iHelp would like to introduce you to Gerardo Iula. He is the developer for Simiula. He has taken classic stories and turned them into apps.
They are beautifully drawn by Graziano Vitale with an amazing narration as well! The best thing about this app besides the artwork is the auto scroll for the book. Instead of tapping for pages to flip the story side scrolls on its own. I love that feature for kids with limited mobility and younger readers.
For the next two days he has generously made his Little Red Riding Hood App FREE. So go download it! Its a really cute app and has an addition puzzle game that is different each time you play it. Also check out the other apps by him, there are many classic tales in there for kids to read or have read to.
Sentence Builder - Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade
by Abitalk
I was fortunate to win a code for this App on Abitalk's Facebook Page during the week and I am SO impressed with it that I thought I'd write my first blog review about it! I am always on the lookout for good apps to help specifically with Speech Therapy sessions I do at home with my 3 children who have Autism Spectrum Disorders. Sentence Builder will now be used on a daily basis both at home and in their School settings.
Sentence Builder is not only great for teaching younger children how to structure a sentence correctly - but is an excellent tool to use for building receptive speech skills and will also help to build your child's vocabulary.
Level 1:
Level 1 has 35 pre-installed simple sentences starting at 3-word sentences and gradually increases to 9-word sentences. Some of which also include days of the week (in sequence) for children to learn at the same time. There are no incorrect words added into this level, so there is less room for error from the child that is beginning to learn sentence structure and spelling.
Level 2:
Level 2 also has 35 pre-installed sentences which range from 3-9 word sentences. In this level however, there are additional words added in to be able to chosen from. In some pictures there are also capitalized words and also all lower-case words in which your child has to choose the correct option in order to build the sentence correctly.
Create your own lesson:
It's important for me to be able to customize apps to suit my children and Sentence Builder has this important feature as well! It's easy and quick to add a sentence and simple to edit if you make a mistake. You just have to choose a picture from your Camera Roll, then type your sentence and record the sentence. You then record each individual word and can add extra words (like in Level 2) if you want.
General Information:
When you touch a word it says it out aloud which is a helpful feature for children who are in the early stages of learning how to spell. The voice-over on the pre-installed sentences is very clear and easy to understand. If your child gets distracted or stuck, you can push the sound button for the sentence to be repeated.
There is a nice little round of applause when you build the sentence correctly by dragging the words and full stop or question/exclamation mark to the column at the bottom of the page. Alternatively there is a game show-like sound when you do not place the words in the correct order.
I love that Sentence Builder has realistic and colorful but not over-stimulating (for my kids with ASD) images.
Suggestions for the Developer:
I think it may be a little more motivating for children if a rewards system was also built into the app - for instance simple 'stickers' that they can collect for each 5 or 7 correctly built sentences.
It would also be great to see updates released around the different holidays for specific sentences relative to the events that take place around that time.
