Tap the Cat

 Appy Chat & Giveaway

Developer: Reading Eggs

Appy Chat:

Tap the Cat iPad app was launched in October 2012 by the Reading Eggs team and was developed by a highly experienced team of educational teachers, writers and developers and focus on using skills and strategies essential for sustained learning success. The app is designed for young readers who are just starting out on their learning-to-read journey and can read some 3 letter words.

At Reading Eggs we believe that learning to read should be fun and full of success. There are 9 different activities within the Tap the Cat app and each activity within the app focuses on a different core reading skill such as the alphabet, phonics, sight words, vocabulary, comprehension and handwriting using fun, interactive and motivating activities. Tap the Cat provides lots of variety to ensure that children will get many hours of enjoyment and learning from this app. An extra special feature of the app is that it makes an ebook out of the completed work of the child (such as coloured in pictures and voice recordings). This ebook is then unlocked and played back to the child when they have completed all 9 activities.

Description:

Start your child on their reading journey with Tap the Cat. Suitable for 4-6 year olds, each of the 9 playful activities builds and reinforces a different literacy skill – from letter sounds, rhyming words and phonics to colouring, vocabulary, speaking and handwriting.
Tap the Cat appeals to your child’s natural sense of play with a wide variety of different activities. Your child can match spaceship letters, drag letters to make words, hop a rabbit home, match words to pictures, build their vocabulary and paint pictures. Each activity will keep them motivated and engaged with colourful animations, catchy music, fun sound effects and reward screens.
With an emphasis on touch, Tap the Cat helps build the fine motor skills needed for handwriting as your child writes letters and words using correct letter formation, as well as colouring in pictures.
Featuring voice feedback interactivity, Tap the Cat helps boost your child’s word pronunciation skills, as they record their own voice, and then play back what they said!
Tap the Cat is brought to you by the makers of popular educational website Reading Eggs – a team of educators with more than 20 years’ experience in early childhood education, who believe learning to read should be fun, motivating, and full of success.

Features
– Suitable for children aged 4 – 6.
– Includes 9 activities, playable at 2 levels of difficulty.
– Develops key early literacy skills including upper and lower case letters, rhyming, phonics, comprehension, encoding words, vocabulary, sight words and reading a book.
– Helps build essential motor skills through touch-based activities including handwriting, painting, and arranging letters to form a word.
– Your child can record and play back their own voice to practice word pronunciation.
– An extra special feature allows your child to create an e-book of all their completed drawings and recordings. Once all 9 activities are completed, this e-book will unlock and their writing, pictures and voice recordings will come to life.

Review:

What I first notice when opening the app is the lovely music and the simple introduction and instructions.  When given an app, my eye is always drawn to settings. For this app settings include a choice of accent – Australian, United Kingdom or American, you can have 1-4 players and a choice whether you would like the music on or off – brilliant.

Upon starting the app you have a choice of Level 1 or level 2, though level 2 is locked until Level 1 is completed.

Level 1 consists of 9 activities which include:
Writing – this is where you practice writing words
Letters – find the matching letters, both the name and the sound is used
Smart Quiz – Listen to the question and selecting the correct image, lots of descriptive language
Speak and Listen – your child records themselves saying a word they have just read
Making Words – a picture is shown and then the word is phonically sounded out, there are more letters than needed
Draw and Paint – a choice of 6 pictures to paint
Time to Rhyme – find the rhyming words – ending sound
Vocabulary – Tap the word to hear it.  Choose the picture that matches
Sight-Words – tap the matching word to help the bunny hop home

Once the activities are completed in the section, the egg is decorated in that section. Once all activities are completed, Lvl 2 is unlocked.

I do enjoy all of the readingeggs.com literacy program from the online programs or computer program, reading books, activities, flashcards and now with the addition of these apps – amazing.  I personally feel, one of the most wonderful thing we can give our children is the gift of reading.

Specifications:

Category: Literacy
Released: October 28, 2012
Version: 1.0
Language: English
Requirements: Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

Links:

Website: Reading Eggs
Facebook Page: Reading Eggs
Twitter:  @readingeggs
Pinterest: Reading Eggs
App: Tap the Cat
Cost: $2.99

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Giveaway:

We have a Rafflecopter giveaway until April 8, 2013