Top 5 iPad Apps for Speech Therapy Sessions

Welcome and thanks to my guest blogger, Kandice from Sparkly Speech Girl!

In my therapy sessions I like to use multiple modalities to target a child’s goal; if you’re following my speech journey on Instagram you know that I love using books, games, sensory bins, worksheets and my iPad! I work with pre-school through High School aged students and ALL of my students are motivated to use the iPad in their speech therapy sessions. There is an abundant amount of wonderful speech and language apps out there but here’s a look at my top 5 “go-to” favorite iPad Apps to use in speech sessions:

1. Bag Game by all4mychild

• Best for Grades: Preschool-6th grade • Cost: $1.99 • Goals to target: Asking and Answering questions, naming described objects, using descriptive language and increasing Mean Length Utterance (MLU). • Quick Description: This is basically a “What’s in the Bag?” game. Users pick a picture to “hide” in the bag and the other players must guess what the hidden picture from clues given. • Why I love it: This is my #1 most requested app in speech! You can play this multiple ways: 1) The clinician hides the objects and describes it for the students to guess what’s hidden, 2) One student hides the objects and gives clues to the other students, 3) The clinician or a student hides the picture and the other players have to ask questions about the hidden picture (i.e. “Is it an animal?”).

2. Verbs by I CAN DO APPS, LLC

• Best for Grades: Preschool-6^th grade
• Cost: $4.99
• Goals to target: Verb tenses, constructing sentences, identifying verbs and pictures.
• Quick Description: Users can choose various ways they want to target working on verbs (by expressively stating the verb or pointing to the verb) and which verb tense they are targeting.
• Why I love it: I love the real-life images and pictures this app uses. I also like that you can choose 5 different ways to work on verbs (receptively or expressively) and when you don’t have flashcards available this is a perfect alternative.

3. Brainy Skills Idioms by A Brainy Choice, Inc.

(*Any of the “Brainy Skills” Apps I love to use!)

• Best for Grades 4^th-12^th grade
• Cost: $0.99
• Goals to target: Idioms and figurative language.
• Quick Description: Users first choose between playing at the “easy” and “hard” level. Once the level is chosen, an idiom with 2 answer choices are given for users to select the correct idiom meaning. For each correct response, users can earn points and move up levels.
• Why I love it: My students love that it can be played as a game and they get to score points (older students are usually very motivated to earn points!). I also like that there are 2 different levels so I can use with various age groups.

4. FollowDirections by Teach Speech Apps

• Best for Grades: Preschool-4th grade
• Cost: $3.99
• Goals to target: Following Directions, prepositions, temporal concepts and motor-skill based and conditional directions.
• Quick Description: Users can pick between 4 different areas/ways to work on following directions. Once you pick which direction to target then users have 10 drill sets for each direction and the app keeps track of the number correct for you.
• Why I love it: This app offers easy and quick practices for following directions and I love that it keeps track of the progress for you.

5. Articulation Station Pro by Little Bee Speech

• Best for Grades: Any grade/age level can benefit from this app
• Cost: $59.99 for Pro Version (Includes ALL sounds and worth the extra money)
• Goals to target: Articulation at every level
• Quick Description: Users can choose which sound to target, flashcards or game mode, which level to work on (words, phrases, sentences or reading) and which sound position to target (initial, medial, final or blends).
• Why I love it: There is a “lite” version of this app but is it worth the money to download the Pro version to get all the sounds. I love that you can choose to do a game, flashcards or reading sentences and stories. The graphics are great and it’s a very user-friendly app!

Honorable Mentions: I also love using any of the articulations apps created by Erik X. Raj (an SLP!) because he has created some fun and motivating game apps to target articulation. Super Duper Inc. has many wonderful FREE and low-cost apps that target many speech and language goals. Lastly, the “Kindle” App makes it very easy and convenient to read books on the IPad in speech…and if you’re an Amazon Kindle member many books are FREE to download. I hope this has been a helpful post! Please comment on some of your favorite apps below! Thank you, Kandice for these awesome speech and language apps! You can find her on Teachers Pay Teachers and Instagram.

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