Random App of Kindness-Limited Time

Thanks to Smart Apps for Kids for another great app review AND notification of a great FREE App.    

We are writing this quickly because it is unclear how long Touch and Write will remain free.   After reading the review in Smart Apps for kids, we immediately got the app and tried it out.  Although it was developed to help teach fine motor writing skills, here are some additional ways we are going to use it to facilitate communication and language skills. Please let us know if you have some additional ideas.

• Choice making- the learner can choose the what  you write with (ketchup, shaving cream, paint, chocolate pudding and many more), you can also choose the paper type from 28 options, and you can also choose to hear music or not, and whether or not to have tracing cues
• Turn Taking and Choice Making- This activity can be done collaboratively with a peer or language facilitator and decisions can be made about who writes and who decides to choose type of paper or type of writing materials.  Sometimes it’s best to let the writer be the decision maker while other times it is better to have the writer take directions from the partner.
• Categories- the facilitator can decide which category to talk about: bugs or animals because once the word is written there are images and actions that relate to the word.
• Metalinguistic Awareness- metalinguistic awareness involves the skill of using language to talk about language.  Word families can be selected  to ‘write’. We will model language and have discussions about word families and how words change based on initial letter in word families.
• Writing/Talking Stories- We will use some of the words that we write to make short stories or to write notes or letters. We will  pre-write some index cards with target words and then use those to make a short story or note or letter that relates to a theme. We may use the target word to tell about the app activity, or even to make a poster about a category we worked on. We love when we can ‘talk’ about the activity after it is over and can easily do that if we have a written ‘product’.

Hope you get this while it is free but if you miss it,  we would definitely buy it anyway.  Hope everyone has a fun weekend.