“I was recently assessed by the county and my daughter has a mild speech delay. Her delay did not warrant therapy but the evaluating therapist recommended a home program and also recommended some iPad applications. Are there any specific apps that you use or recommend?”

The iPad is a wonderful tool and yes, there are many apps that we use from time to time with our clients.  I am a huge advocate for working on language and speech through board games and play but there are certainly times when the iPad has its advantages.  Listed below are some of our favorite apps for speech and language development.  

1) My Play Home: This app features an interactive play surface including different rooms of a house.  My Play Home allows the child to move items and people around the house, make things happen, give directions, follow directions and give explanations. It’s a great game for improving both receptive and expressive vocabulary.  You can also target turn-taking, sharing, initiating, and protesting with this awesome application.

2) Articulation Station:  This app includes a complete set of consonant phoneme practice decks.  Each sound facilitates practice at the single word level, sentence level or within stories.  It features a recording option for auditory feedback and a data collection feature to help you monitor progress with individual sounds.

3) Speech with Milo:  These apps target many different aspects of language.  A few of our favorites are: Sequencing with Milo (3 step directions), Prepositions with Milo, Adjectives with Milo and Verbs with Milo.

4) Splingo: This wonderful app targets following spoken instructions focused on nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions.  It keeps children motivated with interactive games between specific tasks.

5) Smarty Ears Wh-Questions:  Wh-questions is an app designed to help children ask and answer WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN and WHY questions.  This app features a recording option which allows children to record their response or record their question.  It also allows you to keep data on each individual question type.