I imagine

I imagine by bizzibrains is a free interactive picturebook for preschoolers. Before reading the story, you have to build the characters. You get to choose hair, clothes and a face for a parent, a child, and the child's toy. And then you can save up to three sets of characters. The best part for us was using the iPad's camera to create the characters' faces. Autumn and I made silly faces, switched bodies so that she was the adult and I was the kid, and generally enjoyed ourselves with this. You also get to name the characters both in print and in the voiceover, so of course everyone ended up with names from Frozen or The Swan Princess.

Once you have designed the characters, they get inserted into an e-book. The story is simple: a parent is trying to work--and the term "work" is employed loosely here, as the parent figure is sometimes seen doing laundry, and sometimes sitting at a computer--but whatever the parent is doing, the child wants attention. The caretaker (in our case, Odette, with Autumn's face) tries various ways of occupying the child (Kristof, with my face)... a train set, a sandbox, arts and crafts... Finally, she sends the child to her room, where the kid stops whining, exercises her imagination, and begins to have fun with her toy doll.

I have minor quibbles with the app--for example, there doesn't seem to be any way to turn back a page--but overall, Autumn loves it. There is interaction on every page that is germane to the storyline. The text tracking matches the narration. And the story is cohesive, if slim.

Brooklyn looked over our shoulder briefly as we were playing, but she didn't get a chance to try the app out yet. I don't think it will hold a six-year-old's attention quite as long as it did the three-year-old's. She will enjoy making the characters too, but the story won't hold up for repeated tellings. But that is okay--this is a great app for younger kids. Critics like the educational columnist Annie Murphy Paul have criticized e-books for stunting children's imagination and not being easy to share (see her rant in the School Library Journal), but Autumn and I found this app an excellent vehicle for sharing and stimulating conversation. While we did talk about mechanics quite a bit like how to make the app work, we also discussed richer things, like what to draw on the arts and crafts page; when and where Autumn has made sand castles on the sandbox page; and what Autumn would play with her dolls if she was alone and amusing herself in her room.

In all, Autumn and I spent about half an hour with the app last night. She was engaged and talkative the entire time. Which is more than I can say for her behavior when we are reading some of her print books together. I firmly believe that e-books are not necessarily terrible for younger readers; the trick is to match the right book to the reader and to actively share the book together. I imagine makes that easy to do.

Storybook Maker

Storybook Maker is basically a desktop publishing app for children (or should I just call it a publishing app? There is no desktop computer involved—everything is created right on the iPad… is there a name for this type of program yet?). At any rate, you create books with as many or as few pages as you like and the result is a multi-media book to read on the iPad or to save/email/print as a pdf.

Here is a short demonstration that explains better than I ever could: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms3lKtdIJxA

Mastering this app took a little more effort on my behalf. I tried just installing it on our iPad and waiting to see if my 5-year-old would figure it out for us, but she ignored it. In the past, Brooklyn and I have had moments of collaborative brilliance making up bedtime stories together ("Princess Stinkyfeet"), so I had a vision of us collaborating on a multimedia project in which she dictated while I typed, she illustrated and I helped arrange, etc. But first I had to figure out how to use the app. And, in the end, it really was very intuitive, but there are just so darn many options to wade through first!

When I finally did sit down with the iPad, it was following a long weekend in NH with the grandparents. I used the app to create a souvenir photo book in which I included photos and stories about the places we went and the things we saw. The app really was ridiculously easy to use, but I didn’t actually use many of the options available to me: I didn’t change the font size or color, I didn’t use the stickers or physics objects, and I didn’t draw free hand.

Here is a page from my initial attempt at using the app:

When I showed Brooklyn what I had done, she was as excited as I was by the app. One thing that was interesting though, was that she immediately wanted to do everything I hadn’t even thought to do the first time around. She took the iPad from me and made her own book with free-form drawings and stickers that same day. After that, we explored a bit more together and we were both excited to find the backgrounds and borders to jazz up our creations. Later, I realized I could have included even more cool extras in my NH scrapbook, like sound effects, including the boom of fireworks to go along with my Fourth of July photos.

Here is a page from one of Brooklyn’s independent creations:

If this sounds like a lot of work, I suppose it is, but it’s also fun. And it’s certainly a powerful literacy tool as well. Over the past few days Brooklyn and I have finally begun to commit our Princess Stinkyfeet ideas to the screen. We’ve been working slowly, in the quiet moments when her sister is napping. Brooklyn talks, and I edit as I type. I knew that she was creative, but one unexpected delight is how much care Brooklyn is also putting into the language. Our basic plot is that Princess Stinkyfeet has horrifically smelly feet and so she tries many things to solve the problem, but the smell keeps coming back. Today, after a page about the princess going on vacation and the townspeople being able to breathe easier while she was away, Brooklyn instructed me to include the sentence, “Wherever she goes, the stink goes.” I was impressed with the turn of phrase, and told her so. That is the type of thoughtful interaction that the iPad can be a powerful tool in facilitating, if you are willing to put in the time and energy. Happily, that’s all it takes though—it’s not expensive at $3.99. And there are no in-app purchases. 

 This is an app I can enthusiastically recommend to everyone, but I envision it being used most in upper elementary classrooms. So teacher-friends, take note!

Super Why!

 

           

           My two-year-old has recently started singing the alphabet song. She sings, “A, B, C, W, X, Y, Z, NOW I KNOW MY ABCs! NEXT TIME WON’T YOU SING WITH ME…!!” Whoops. Beginning reading—specifically phonics—is my professional specialty, so I may take these things a little too personally…  That said, I was amenable, but not expecting much, when she wanted to play her older sister’s Super Why! game on the iPad.

            Super Why! is a PBS Kids show, but we don’t watch it at home; I’ve seen it a few times, and vaguely think of it as the show where those cartoon kids jump into a book. But Autumn clearly knew the show: she recognized the icon and chose the app herself. They must watch it at her babysitter’s house.

            At any rate, she opened the app and chose to play Princess Presto’s Wands Up Writing game. When the game opens, you see a four-letter array and three lines for letters. Princess Presto explains that you need to listen as she says the letter sounds so that you can choose the correct letter to spell the word. For Autumn, the first sound was /m/. Then you are supposed to choose the M from the array. So Princess Presto asked, “What letter makes the sound /m/?”, and Autumn turns around to me and asks, "Mom, which one is the M?" At that point, I stopped what I was doing and started paying more attention. Since when does my toddler know her letter sounds?! But she does—she got the next few right as well. I don’t know if this phonological knowledge is a product of watching Super Why! with the babysitter or what, but we’ve been playing with the Super Why! app all week now.

            In addition to Princess Presto’s Wands Up Writing game (which is called that because you are asked to trace the letter with your finger after identifying it by sound), there are three other interactive games in the app. You can practice rhyming with Wonder Red; go on a letter hunt with Alpha Pig; or finish sentences to save stories with Super Why. Each one is visually appealing to match the PBS show. More importantly, the designers got the educational aspects just right: the sounds are crisp and clear, everything is spelled correctly, and the games move at a pace controlled by the app user. Believe it or not, this is not the standard in every app. I have reviewed many a free phonics app available for the iPad, and it is often the case that there are small errors in the apps: In the really pretty and innovative Endless Alphabet app by Callaway Digital Arts, for example, the vowels make their short sound as you drag them into the word, but that is often not the sound they make within the word being spelled (the o’s in “kazoo” sound nothing like the short o sound). And Super Why! does more than just practice phonics: in other games, children practice reading words, comprehending stories, and recognizing letters, among other beginning literacy skills.

             In sum, if you are looking for a solid app for practicing beginning reading in a game-like atmosphere, this is $2.99 well spent. Both of my kids like it, and I like what they are learning from it.