I think we can all agree… there has been a lot of time spent at home lately and the ability to keep your child busy and engaged is starting to fade. On top of all of this, you are continuing to work from home and stay on top of the housework. We see you pulling out the big guns and we are here to help. We have compiled our favourite speech and language apps for both younger and older children to enjoy.
Apps for Younger Children
– Toca Boca: Great interactive app to explore and navigate life scenarios and places in the community. Check out: Toca Life: Neighborhood, After School, Office, Vacation, Stable, Pets, Hospital, City, and School.
– Peekaboo Farm: Fun app for toddlers! Great for teaching new vocabulary and following directions. Check out: Peekaboo Barn, Forrest, Fridge, Presents, and Wild!
– Vooks: New way to incorporate literacy into your day. This app is filled with interactive storybooks for children ages 2-8 years old. Check out the app or their website for ideas and activities to do while listening to each interactive story!
– My Talking Pet: One of my favorite apps to engage kids of all ages! This app allows you to choose a pet and record your voice to create hilarious videos for your whole family to enjoy! Have fun dressing your pet in silly hats and glasses.
– Video Touch Series: VideoTouch Series is fun way for toddlers to learn language. Each app allows your child to choose an animal, vehicle, or musical instrument and watch a short clip describing the animal. Check out: VideoTouch Wild Animals, Wild Birds, Bugs & Insects, Vehicles and Music.
– Nighty Night: The Nighty Night series is great for building into bedtime routines. Each animal must perform their “bedtime trick” before going to sleep. Great for talking about “bedtime” vocabulary. Check out: Nighty Night, Nighty Night Circus, Nighty Night Forrest.
– Little Vehicle Series: The Fox & Sheep rescue team help your child through difficult scenarios such as going to the hospital, the police station, and fire station. Check out: Little Police Station, Little Fire Station, and Little Hospital.
– My Play Home: This app is great for imagination and interactive pretend play skills. You can help your child walk through around the house tasks, such as showering, eating breakfast, and turning off the lights.
– Hungry Caterpillar PlaySchool: We all know and love the hungry caterpillar! This app incorporates learning and exploration through play. Skills include: math development, language and literacy, science and nature studies, creative arts, puzzles and reasoning!
Apps for Older Children
– Articulation Station: This app is great for continuing your speech sound practice at home or on the go! The app includes all target sounds at the sound, word, sentence, and story level. Easy way to get quick practice in without searching for those flashcards!
– Dinosaur Park- Jurassic Dig: For the dinosaur lover in your house. This app is perfect for incorporating language into a fun interactive game. Pick a favourite car and go digging for dinosaur fossils. Work on describing what you are doing and what you see while you play!
– Describe it to me: This app is great for even more than just describing! It can be used to work on answering wh- questions, categorizing, and more. You and your child will love the “game show” feel while learning!
– Teach your Monster to Read: Teach your Monster to Read allows you to create a monster and take it on a magical journey through a variety of phonics and early reading games.
– ChoiceWorks: If you use visual schedules at home, you MUST check out this app! Consider it your “go with you schedule.” This allows you to create a visual schedule using pictures in your environment and create routine schedules to pull up on the fly. It also has visual timers and feeling cards built in.
– Speech Tutor: This app is great for working on those tricky speech sounds. This app provides a great visual of what your tongue, lips, and mouth are doing while you produce each speech sound.
– Social Story Creator and Library: An amazing app for easily creating, sharing, and printing social stories and visual schedules. Great to take your social stories with you anywhere! Very easy to use app.
– Virtual Speech Center: This app developer has tons of great speech and language apps. Depending what your child is working on, there is a specific app for it. Some of our favourites are: Articulation Carnival, Farm Academy, Questions Hunt, and Social Skills with Billy
– Sensory Cinevox: This is a fun sensory app that responds to sounds and words. The effects of the screen change with mirrors, spirals, bubbles, and kaleidoscope. It is a great motivator to practice any speech or language goals.
