2 Reading and 2 Writing Apps for Young Children

By: Katherine McKay, EC-SEAT Scholar

Reading Apps

WordMonsters is a free app that supports literacy for young children. The app offers books appropriate for kindergarten aged readers, one comes for free and the others must be purchased. Each book has the option to read on your own, read to me (text to speech), or play activities related to the story. Some features of this app that I like are its option to read aloud the sentences in read on your own mode and the ability for a child to touch a word and have the app sound out the word phonetically while highlighting each letter or blend. This app would be useful for a student requiring text to speech for reading, a student with dyslexia, or a student with visual processing challenges. Because the app offers text to speech to read aloud the story, students needing auditory input for literacy access would benefit from these features. Students are able to follow along with the written words, but do not have to rely on visual input alone for comprehension or decoding.

Pocket Phonics Lite. This app promotes literacy through handwriting practice of lowercase letters. While this may not be the most comprehensive or developmentally appropriate app for handwriting, in a pinch it allows teachers to practice some letters for free. This version of the app is free but it does not include all the letters of the alphabet or any customization, those come with the app upgrade for $6.99. This app would be helpful for a child with motor planning difficulties or a student needing motivation for work. The reason this app could help a student with motor planning issues is that the app features a red moving arrow that shows the student where their finger or stylus should be going to correctly form the letter. For motivation, the app features pen and pencil characters that praise the student.
   
Writing Apps

The SnapType app is a free writing app that allows teachers to take a picture of a child's classroom worksheet and have the child digitally insert his/her answer by typing. This app would be great for students who are not physically able to attend the class but still want to complete the same work as other students as it allows full digitization of the worksheet; the teacher can send it electronically, the student can complete it electronically, and then the student can send an image or PDF of the worksheet back to the teacher. Another functional limitation this app can help overcome would be dysgraphia or other learning disabilities affecting writing or spelling. Because the worksheet can be completed through typing, the student could use spellcheck features on their iPad to correctly complete words and sentences, and a student could even use a third party keyboard to access typing however works best for them.

(If the blue machine was my worksheet, the yellow word "ran" is an example of my digital typing onto the worksheet image)


The Spell Better app has a free and a paid version for $24.99. The free version is essentially a trial only and to really utilize this app in a classroom, the teacher would need to have the paid version. This app includes a highlighted keyboard option and offers text prediction as well as text to speech. A student with dysgraphia, challenges with visual input, or other learning disabilities affecting writing or spelling would benefit from this app. Students who are not able to physically write would be able to use this app to type their writing. Students with spelling challenges can benefit from this app as it includes spell checking and word prediction to help students get the right word on the page. This app also helps to reduce cognitive load as the word prediction lessens the number of characters a student needs to choose before having the word presented to them. Students needing auditory input can use the text to speech feature of this app to hear whether they selected the word they intended or not based on sound. The app includes several options related to the speech features to customize the experience for the child. Finally, this app features the dyslexia open font which is beneficial to students with dyslexia as it helps the brain discriminate better between letters.