Makes Sound Practice Fun!

***Mic is working on iOS 5 now, so re-submitting without that comment for the current version!***

What We Liked:

My little girls fell for Tiga Talk hard and fast. They soon discovered its location on our iDevices, and I would find them making sounds very enthusiastically in front of the device in their efforts to propel a rocket ship, a boat, to pop bubbles, and to smash space rocks amongst other fun challenges.

My five-year-old has articulation delays, so it means a lot to me that she enjoys practicing her sounds with this app. She quickly learned to tap on the mouth to see a video of the sound being said by a real person so she could model her own sound production from that video. She also naturally self-corrects, so if the animal says a sound and she doesn’t think hers is quite right, she’ll tap on the mouth, practice her own sound, and off she’ll go again.

I love that the app lets you pick specific lessons and games to focus in on trouble sounds, but also allows children to go through the whole game from front to back when they’re feeling particularly ambitious! This is actually my girls’ favorite way to use Tiga Talk, though I do incorporate it into practice sessions with my daughter as well. Each lesson and game is short but packs a lot of sound repetitions in, a great fit for short attention spans.

While Tiga Talk only does sounds in isolation, I really hope that we’ll see similar apps coming out for initial, medial, and final sounds in real words for children who are ready to move beyond Tiga Talk but who are highly motivated by the bright cartoons and quest-style storyline.

What We Didn’t Like:

Some of the letter sounds aren’t clipped and add a tiny bit of an ‘uh’ to the end of the sound, like ‘duh’ instead of just ‘d’. Some users have mentioned that the app responds equally well to incorrect pronunciation as it does to correct pronunciation, and this is an accurate observation. The app responds more to voice volume than it does to sound. This hasn’t been an issue for us because my girls try to be as accurate as possible when using this app – the honor system I suppose. I would like to see the option of setting up multiple users on this app. The statistics that track the number of lessons completed aren’t very useful if you have several children using it.

Overall:

Tiga Talk is an incredibly fun and engaging app that irresistibly draws children into practicing articulation skills in a voice-powered adventure. If you have a little one in the beginning stages of learning to pronounce any letter on its own, Tiga Talk will make the process so much more enjoyable for you both whether they are still learning these sounds in speech for the first time at age three, or if they are using the app for remedial speech practice at an older age.

I received a promo code.

Appsforhomeschooling.com about Tiga Talk Speech Therapy Games, v1.3