The My Play home application is an interactive game that I have found to be incredibly useful in therapy for children between the ages of 3-7 years, as well as older children with additional needs. The interactive nature of the game assists with keeping children engaged in the tasks and the Application itself can be incorporated into a variety of speech and language goals and activities.
Ideas for Incorporating the App into Therapy:
- Most children I have come across just enjoy the interactive component of the app. This means that it can be used as a reinforcer after a session of speech or language practice. For example, at home you may choose to do 10 minutes of practice a day and once the practice has been completed, your child can enjoy 5 minutes of free play using the application.
- Another way to incorporate the app is to target goals directly within the application. Below I have listed a few goals that the application can be useful for.
Therapy Goals that may be targeted using the App:
- Speech Goals: Speech sounds such as ‘k’ or ‘s’ can be targeted through the picture stimuli within the app. For example when you are practicing the ‘s’ sound in words, your child can pick out all the ‘s’ words in each scene such as sun, sand, sink etc. If you are working on the ‘s’ sound in sentences, your child can create a sentence with those words such as ‘The sun is in the sky’.
- Language Goals: A number of language goals can be targeted through the app such as understanding concepts (e.g. in, on, under) though following instructions such as “put the apple on the chair”. Goals targeting sentence structure can also be targeted using the application. Picture description phrases such as “The girls is playing in the mud” can be easily generated using this scenes within the application.
You can download the application onto iPad and iPhone devices online through the apple store.
Click on the following link for more information on the application: My PlayHome – An imaginative play house app
For more information on this topic or any speech related fields, contact the ENT Clinic on 1300 123 368 and make an appointment with our Speech Pathologist Ashleigh Fattah.
