Curious George Goes Camping
© 2014 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
This is the fifth title in the useful Houghton Mifflin iRead Library (other titles include Caillou: What's That Funny Noise? and Curious George and the Firefighters (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/curious-george-firefighters/id865212491?mt=8). All the titles in the series follow the same design, combining the ability to insert your own narration behind key words, some excellent innovative text scaffolding techniques, three reading levels and a theater feature that lets you make your own narrated puppet shows. In the story, George and the Man in the Yellow Hat visit a forest. George tries to be helpful, but ends up upsetting a camp site, meeting a skunk and helping to save the day by putting out a forest fire. The reading pedagogy is based on work done at the McGill University Child Phonology Lab. It is commonly called the dialogic reading approach (a read-aloud method that carves out a role for both an adult and a child, and encourages children to ask questions and get involved with the story). The app makes this easier by way of some creative scaffolding techniques which include letting the teacher or child narrate key words, represented by an animated rebus image shown in the context of the text. When a child touches either the word or the image in the story, they trigger a related animation. Other unique features include the ability to toggle between three reading levels and languages (English, French or Spanish). Created by Tribal Nova for Houghton Mifflin. Note that we had trouble getting the app to run on an a first generation iPad Mini.
$2.99, iPad
Teaches: reading, comprehension, creativity, English, French or Spanish
CTR Rating: 92%