Friday, February 26, 2010

iPhone Apps and Occupational Therapists

Here are two iPhone apps that I have tested out for letter formation. Either of these could be used as fun tools to encourage kinesthetic practice of letter formation.


The first I tested was Letter Tracer. This app was $0.99 when I purchased it. I really liked the simplicity of Letter Tracer. The letter is shown in capital or lowercase. There is a voice over to say each letter and number aloud as it appears on the screen. You can change the settings so that you can "write" with different colors and pen size. You can also change the voice from male, female or child. The touch screen picks up the child's finger rather easily which is a plus. Although, there is no guide for where the child to draw the actual strokes of each letter. You can choose between having a stencil of the letter as seen on the right side or no stencil and a blank screen for the child to write the letter.







The second one I tried was ABC Letters Tracing Lite. This app was free for the lite version. I tested the lite version which only goes from the letters A-F. The benefit of this app is that it demonstrates the actual strokes of each letter for the child to follow. Each letter is said aloud with the phonetic sound of each letter. You can choose to view the strokes or to just trace over the letter. There is nice visual and verbal feedback when each stroke is completed. If you choose to follow each stroke, the child must be very precise. This can get frustrating for the child. He/she is doing the correct stroke but the touch screen does not register it exactly resulting in negative feedback (i.e. sorry, try again...). If the child does not follow each stroke and just chooses the tracing option, he/she does not need to be as precise.


Do you use these apps in your practice or can you recommend any others for letter formation?


3 comments:

marcia said...

"iwritewords" is a great tracing app- upper and lowercase letters, numbers, a few simple words. What I like about it is that it makes you write them in the correct direction. Visually it's fun too.

angie said...

Your second recommendation is ABC Letters Tracing Lite. Don't forget the "s" at the end of "Letter". There is another app called ABC Letter Tracing that is not like the one you show here.

Your Therapy Source Inc said...

Thank you for letting me know. I fixed the titles to Letters now.

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