Puppet Pals is a great app for older children, about second grade or higher. In this application, your child can design and record his/her own puppet show. It comes with different characters and backgrounds. We have used this application for a variety of purposes. For children working on specific sounds, they can record their story while “thinking” about their sounds. This allows the child to build his/her self-monitoring skills when they replay the recording and are able to judge the accuracy of the production. For children working on story-telling skills, this application is wonderful. They can plan a story, with a sequence of events and then replay it. It allows for the child to watch the story to see if the story made sense, or did they need to change/add details? It also allows for the speech-pathologist or parent to then ask questions about higher-order thinking skills, such a predicting or inferencing. This might include “What do you think will happen next?” or “Why did the character respond that way?”. As discussed in our MATH AND LANG blog, depending on the story, you can also ask the child if he/she has ever experienced something similar. This allows them to relate the story to personal experience, which helps build vocabulary and language skills. For children working on specific vocabulary words for school, this is also a functional way for them to use the words. Challenge your child to record a story using a certain number of words. Then listen together to see if they used it correctly!