I love it when you find a mainstream app that you can adapt and use in therapy sessions. Last week, I found an app called “Petting Zoo.” This is an app I paid for and I don’t get any compensation for this review. It’s just a really cool activity!
The app contains over 20 line drawings of different animals. But the cool thing about this app is the interactivity of it. The animals change based on 5 different ways you touch the screen.
- Swipe left
- Swipe right
- Swipe down
- Swipe up
- Tap on animal
It’s almost worth it just to work on those concepts. You could ask your clients, “What are you going to do?” and they could respond using the language above.
Here is how we used it in therapy:
Naming:
Verb Vocabulary:
Because each character changes 5 times, it allows you to really target a variety of verbs. This is a great activity for older children as they are challenged to explain what happened when they did a particular action.
Complex Sentences:
I have a lot of clients who need to work on creating more complex sentences. For this activity, I gave students a visual that they could use to create their sentences:
Answering Questions:
It’s easy to target a variety of questions including:
- Where is it?
- What animal is it?
- What happened?
- What did you do?
Predicting:
As my clients got more familiar with the activity, we started to work on predicting. What do you think will happen, what will the elephant do, what do you want it to do.
I’m interested-What are your favorite non-speech discipline apps to use in therapy?
This looks adorable!! I might have to download it!