Does your child:
Have trouble learning the connection between letters and sounds?
Confuses with basic words?
Make reading and spelling errors including letter reversals (b/d, inversions (m/w), transpositions (felt/left), and substitutions (house/home) more often?
Find it difficult to learn basic math concepts?
Takes longer time to learn new skills?
Find it difficult to concentrate?
Lacks focus?
Struggle in remembering facts?
Difficulty in reading comprehension or with letter sequences? (soiled for solid, left for felt)
Ah! The list is longer than expected, but have you ever wondered what is it? Why is it? And how can you help your child overcome these issues.
These often unnoticed issues belong to the list of learning disabilities, brain-based difficulties that can cause kids to struggle in school, socially and with everyday skills.
Haven’t we ever came across such students and scolded them to stay attentive and learn properly? Ignoring, the fact that there may be any issue with them.
Referring to the review by academics at UCL and Goldsmiths approximately 10 per cent of the population are affected by specific learning disabilities (dyslexia, dyscalculia and autism), translating to 2 or 3 pupils in every classroom.
The research clarifies the underlying causes of learning disabilities and the best way to tailor individual teaching and learning for affected individuals and education professionals.
Meanwhile, this sudden school closure has come up with an additional challenge for both educators and children with specific learning disabilities; also their parents.
To help you deal with these challenges, we have curated a list of applications to teach children with learning and attention issues. Let’s explore them!
Dyslexia Toolbox is a free app available on Apple iTunes. According to Gray Smith, CEO and Founder of Brainbook, this app is made “by dyslexics for dyslexics.” Dyslexia Toolbox has a number of features. First, there’s the overlay feature that allows users to turn their smartphone into a digital overlay so that they could read text through a color screen. Another feature allows users to take a photograph with their phone, crop and turn the text into a digital document reader and have text read aloud. Dyslexia Toolbox is best-suited for kids of middle and high school.
News-o-Matic is an interactive, paid subscription-based newspaper application for children of age group 7-10. Every day it publishes five new news stories ranging News-o-matic from fun celebrity stories to serious world political news. These stories are written by experts and reviewed by a child psychologist to ensure child-appropriateness. News-o-Matic comprises of 15 features like stories, puzzles, word games, and audio. It also has as “Read to Me” option for children with auditory processing issues or difficulty with verbal reasoning.
This offers free-trial to its users and charges $4.99/month for full subscription.
The First Then Visual Schedule (FTVS) HD app is an outstanding tool for creating First-Then-Visual-Schedule auditory and visual apps for any child. It is an easy-to-use, multi-sensory interface and has a great potential to help children with “developmental or learning disabilities; anxiety or attention issues; language, hearing, or processing difficulties; or who may be learning English as a second language.”
Parents can use this app too, to create schedules combining images, text, sound and even video for their children. By adding these items to the schedule, they can enhance its appearance and make it more exciting for children and as a result they are more likely to follow it than text-only schedules.
Dexteria Dots is an excellent engaging tool for children to build and practice fundamental math skills. Using the app’s touch interface, children learn math concepts by either separating or combining different dots. Dexteria Dots is a paid app with several different skill levels and most of them have multiple solutions.
IF … The Emotional IQ Game app is an adventure game inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.” Through this app, children learn social skills and emotional intelligence. On this app, they create their own dog avatars and travel on a quest promoting self-awareness and positive social communication, through the fantasy world, Ziggurat. Also allows children to talk with other creatures, make friends and solve problems.
IF … The Emotional IQ Game gives free access to kids for the first chapter only and requires paid subscription for other chapters.
Stop, Breathe, Think, sounds more like a meditation platform? It actually uses guided meditation and breathing exercises to help children relax and refocus. For beginners, it includes a stop breathe thinkprimer on how to meditate. Later, individuals can select words and images that illustrate their current state of mind. Then the app provides a list of appropriate exercises catering their requirement. It also tracks their total meditation time and how “settled” they feel.
It is a cost-free app but seeks money for buying additional meditations.
Leo’s Pad: Preschool Kids Learning Series app teaches young children social and academic skills, creativity and a Leo’s Pad love of learning through animated storytelling. Each chapter has a story and features interactive games, puzzles, and songs. There is also a “Parent’s Pad” within the app, which help track progress of each child’s play and explains all of the skills and ideas they are developing during play.
Designed for Preschool, early grade school children, the app gives access to first chapter for free and $24.99 for all six episodes (stories).
Voice Dream Reader is a cost-free highly customizable, text-to-speech app that can read content in a variety of voices from a myriad of sources. The app allows its user to customize the reading speed, font, voice and text size. Children with dyslexia or auditory-processing or vision impairments may find this app especially voice dream reader beneficial. They may access documents saved in Dropbox, Google Drive, and Evernote by connecting the app to these accounts. Voice Dream Reader is a great tool to help children learn how to use adaptive technologies to achieve academic and personal goals.
ModMath is a program designed especially for students of grade, middle and high school. It displays virtual graph paper for children to use to set up math equations. Here, children can create worksheets by simply tapping in a cell on the graph paper to make a keypad appear. As they enter equations, the program automatically aligns numbers and symbols in columns and/or rows so they are legible. This makes finding solutions easier for children, especially for those who struggle writing legibly. Also, allow users to save, email or print the modmath solved problems.
Toca Nature is a paid-app that belongs to a group of Toca Boca apps; it focuses on open-ended, creative exploration. Toca Nature helps children build a natural environment with natural elements like trees, lakes and mountains. They can then observe what happens as animals’ move to Toca nature and food sources become abundant. Here, the interaction is slow and calm, just like a peaceful walk in a tranquil forest, and will require some patience by the child.
