Recommended tools
Navigating the world of communication can be confusing and we're here to make it simple. See our top choices for all things speech!
Articulation
Articulation Scenes comes with 72 stunning built-in scenes and over 1200 practice words which provide numerous opportunities for children to pronounce their sounds more clearly. All activities were beautifully designed around the theme of cinema and movies for a fun and interesting learning activity.
Wacky Selfie Articulation is a comprehensive collection of over 450 hilarious sound-specific stickers that can be placed on top of a selfie photo to turn a regular selfie into a wacky one. This photo-based app was made to be used with youngsters who exhibit difficulty producing the following speech sounds: S, Z, R, L, S/R/L Blends, SH, CH, and TH.
Charades Articulation is an easy-to-play and fast-paced speech therapy game helps players to have fun while describing, acting out, and guessing random words. Charades Articulation elaborates on the classic party game of charades by including a comprehensive collection of over 1,000 sound-specific articulation words that can be chosen from to appear during a round of play.
Word Search Articulation is jam-packed with over 1,000 sound-specific articulation words that can be hunted for. These puzzles contain hidden words designed to use with individuals who exhibit difficulty producing the following speech sounds: S, Z, R, L, S/R/L Blends, SH, CH, and TH.
Listen Close Articulation is a unique speech therapy game that challenges players to memorize and repeat an ever-increasing string of articulation word sequences. It features a comprehensive collection of over 600 sound-specific articulation words to use with individuals who exhibit difficulty producing the following speech sounds: S, Z, R, L, S/R/L Blends, SH, CH, and TH.
SLP Minimal Pairs Full uses pairs of 367 words to help clients identify and correct phonological sounds. Developed by speech-language pathologists, this app can help identify phonological disorders in children age pre-Kindergarten through sixth grade.
What’s the Pic Articulation comes with 1800+ High Definition images and words for 25 sounds in initial, medial, and final positions, including L, R, S blends, and Vocalic R. The object of the game is to get lots of productions by rewarding EVERY speech sound practice while the player is a detective trying to guess the hidden picture first.
Multiple Choice Articulation is an interactive app that features a collection of over 500 hilarious multiple choice questions designed for individuals who exhibit difficulty producing the following speech sounds: S, Z, R, L, S/R/L Blends, SH, CH, and TH.
I Dare You Articulation is an interactive app that features a collection of 600 child-friendly dares designed for individuals who exhibit difficulty producing the following speech sounds: S, Z, R, L, S/R/L Blends, SH, CH, and TH.
R-intensive is the most engaging, and comprehensive go-to application for children who need a tool for practicing the production of the phoneme /r/ at the word, phrase, and sentence level.
ArtikPix utilizes speech sound delays through 21 decks for the following sounds: th, f, v, ch, sh, k, g, s, z, l, r, s-blends, r-blends, l-blends, p, b, m, n, t, d, j. The decks are combined, selected for sound group, then practiced in full-featured flashcard and matching activities. The features include recorded audio, voice recording, and scoring and data collection.
Blue Whale NACD is an app for children struggling with Apraxia and articulation (CVC productions only). Imitate consonant-vowel-consonant (“CVC”) productions. 8 levels of complexity included.
Talking Larry the Bird features a bird named Larry who will repeat back everything he hears in a silly voice. This is great for giving children a motivating reason to practice their speech and language skills.
Literacy
Phonics Studio, makes learning how to pronounce words fun and easy. Mastering pronunciation, your students will also greatly expand their existing vocabulary since the app comes fully loaded with over 2,500 gorgeous flash cards.
Profile of Phonological Awareness was developed for the purpose of evaluating and describing the phonological awareness skills of children.
Motivational Games
Whiteboard is a portable whiteboard that didn't leave a mess and didn't need markers or an eraser. This app is a dream come true. It has multiple options for drawing different colors, adding multiple layers, using text, as well as collaboration with other users who also have the app. It's a great alternative to a physical whiteboard with unlimited uses.
Dice determines how many times a student needs to say a sound during therapy, how many turns someone in the group takes, or how many homework items they have to find at home that have the /r/ sound in them.
Google Earth is an app you can use it for following directions, teaching prepositions, strengthening memory abilities, all while navigating through any city in the world. And all this while sitting at the table.
Make Dice Lite is one step up from the "Dice" app because it lets you create your own custom dice for whatever you working on, sounds, vocab, verbs, nouns, adjectives, whatever. Make as many custom dice as you want and it saves them right in the app.
The Ultimate Buzzer helps reinforce children by hearing the ding when they did it right.
Receptive Language
Question Builder is designed to help elementary aged children learn to answer abstract questions and create responses based on inference. Extensive use of audio clips promotes improved auditory processing for special needs children with autism spectrum disorders or sensory processing disorders.
Language Empires is designed for elementary age students and targets 8 goals: Answering how, why, and which questions, inferencing, vocabulary, predicting, figurative language, and sequencing.
WH Question Cards is a virtual version of their “wh-” question cards that they sell on their website. Each set of cards includes many questions using the target “wh-” word. Also included are four different games you can play while your child is practicing the wh- questions including matching and the super duper secret decoder game which allows the child to slide the decoder over the choices to find the correct response.
Expressive Language
Language Builder targets picture description, sentence formation, word order, verb tense, vocabulary, pronouns. It is designed to help children improve sentence ideation, sentence formation, and receptive and expressive language.
Preposition Builder targets picture description and sentences formation using appropriate prepositions. It is designed to help elementary aged children learn to use prepositions and learn how prepositions can change the meaning of a sentence.
TenseBuilder is designed to help students learn how to identify and use correct tense forms by playing movie quality animated videos to demonstrate past, present and future tense. 48 video lessons (will expand to 54) are in place to help give students a deeper understanding about the purpose of tense. Special attention is paid to the past tense of irregular verbs.
Sentence Builder is designed to help elementary aged children learn how to build grammatically correct sentences. Attention is paid to the connector words that make up over 80% of the English language. Sentence Builder offers a rich and fun environment for improving the grammar of all children.social settings.
SentenceBuilderTeen is designed to help teenage children learn how to build grammatically correct sentences.
Rainbow Sentences is designed to help students improve their ability to construct grammatically correct sentences, the who, what, where, and why parts of sentences are color coded to help students recognize and understand how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure.
Syntax City targets a variety of grammatical elements for elementary and middle school children. The English rules of plurals, irregular verbs and verb agreement are addressed.
iName it was designed to assist individuals with word finding difficulty secondary to aphasia. Additionally, it can benefit individuals with apraxia that are assisted by visual and sentence completion cues.
Splingo’s Language Universe is a fun alien hosted app that helps develop listening and language skills. It is an entertaining, motivating game, where the focus is on a variety of different aspects of language, including naming words (nouns), action words (verbs), location words (prepositions), description words (adjectives), e.g. color, size.
Speak it! Text to Speech, allows you to copy and paste text or type your own text into the app and then reads the text aloud. This is great for students working on grammatical structures and sentence formation.
Dragon Dictation, is speech to text application. To use it, students speak into the microphone and their speech is converted to text. The accuracy is impressive, even with difficult words or background noise.
iCommunicate lets you design visual schedules, storyboards, communication boards, routines, flash cards, choice boards, speech cards, and more.
Describe It (SLP) developed to increase children’s semantic language skills. It works to provide children a framework of reference to describe words/objects.
Toontastic: All Access is a wonderful creative learning tool that empowers kids to draw, animate, and share their own cartoons through imaginative play. Perfect for encouraging all kinds of speech and language skills.
My PlayHome again not specifically for speech and language, but every SLP has it on their list. It is the original and best doll house app. Massively interactive, your kids can explore and use everything in the house. The characters eat, sleep, shower, brush their teeth, open the closets, watch TV and take showers.
Sono Flex serves the purpose of a communication device for children who are having difficulty communicating with the people around them. This is a cost-effective alternative to dedicated communication devices which can cost several thousand dollars. Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) devices are a great option for children with autism, down syndrome, apraxia of speech, or other communication disorders that cause them to not be able to communicate verbally. With this app, children can push a button or combination of buttons and it will speak their message for them.
Verbally is is an easy-to-use, comprehensive augmentative and alternative Communication (AAC) app for the iPad. Verbally brings speech to those without and enables real conversation with its simple, intuitive design. Just tap in what you want to say and Verbally speaks for you.
Story Builder for iPad targets picture description, word order, sentence formation, vocabulary, making predictions, cause/effect, pronouns, verb tense, and sequencing. It is designed to help children improve in paragraph formation, integration of ideas, and making higher level abstractions by inference.
iSequence is an educational app for children with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome that enables them to practice 100 different sequences of everyday situations, such as: Autonomous habits like brushing their teeth, washing their hands, getting dressed or going to bed. Fun activities like going to the beach, to the movies or do sports. Everyday situations like falling down, taking the bus, going the doctor, buying bread or getting wet in the rain. Emotions like happiness, sadness, surprise or fear. Talking along with the lead character in the app provide opportunities to practice speech.
Pictello is a simple way to create talking photo albums and talking books. Each page in a Pictello Story can contain a picture, up to five lines of text, and a recorded sound or text-to-speech using high-quality voices. Target: social stories, story retell, etc.
AAC
Augmentative Alternative Communication
Proloquo2Go provides a master solution to assist anyone who may have difficulty speaking. This communication system redefines AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication).
Sono Flex serves the purpose of a communication device for children who are having difficulty communicating with the people around them. This is a cost-effective alternative to dedicated communication devices which can cost several thousand dollars. Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) devices are a great option for children with autism, down syndrome, apraxia of speech, or other communication disorders that cause them to not be able to communicate verbally. With this app, children can push a button or combination of buttons and it will speak their message for them.
Verbally is is an easy-to-use, comprehensive augmentative and alternative Communication (AAC) app for the iPad. Verbally brings speech to those without and enables real conversation with its simple, intuitive design. Just tap in what you want to say and Verbally speaks for you.
Autism Spectrum
Keyword Understanding is aimed at enhancing comprehension in children with autism and special needs, this is one of the best apps for speech therapy with exercises to practice auditory and written instructions. With an easy to use interface, colorful photos, and 3D objects, users can create thousands of “tasks” for the patient to perform. For example, you can create the task, “Touch the flower,” and follow it up with, “Touch the vase.” Eventually, when the child has mastered simple task comprehension, you can create the more complex task, “Touch the flower and then touch the vase.”
Let’s Be Social provides exercises to practice pragmatic language or social skills. There are 40 lessons that are divided into five skill sets: personal interactions, navigating the community, school behavior, handling change, and social relationships. Lessons depict “normal” interactions and teach the patient what the expected emotions and behaviors are in that interaction. This is shown through a video with thought bubbles to reinforce learning.
The Social Express is an engaging, interactive software application designed for children with autism, Asperger’s, and ADHD, nonverbal learning disabilities, pragmatic language deficits or other social learning challenges.
Social Quest improves pragmatic language comprehension and expression in a variety of social situations for older elementary, middle school, and high school-aged populations.
Speech Blubs makes speech fun and interactive. Think Snapchat filters mixed with an articulation app. Kids love it!
Full Social Skills Builder is for ages 5-12. It targets understanding emotions. Videos are organized according to age group (school age, adolescent). Watch videos in different environments (school, community). Child answers 3-5 multiple choice questions following video. Perspective taking, Identifying appropriate responses (making comments, asking for information)
ConversationBuilderTeen is a conversation simulator designed to help teenaged children learn how to have multi-exchange conversations with their peers, in a variety of social settings. The auditory pattern of conversation is presented in a visual format to help students recognize and master the flow of conversation.
ConversationBuilder is designed to help elementary aged children.
Stuttering
Fluency SIS is intended for school-age children who stutter, SIS (Smart Intervention Strategy) reshapes the approach to stuttering modification. Its goal is to help the child become an effective and confident communicator by desensitizing him or her to feared stimuli, thereby reducing anxiety. Using creativity and humor, it teaches the child how to maintain a positive perception of him or herself.
Fluency Tracker one of the best speech therapy apps for the parents of children who stutter and aims to increase children’s positive feelings about speech, as well as reduce avoidance behavior. Users can enter data regarding how often the child stutters throughout the day, when and where this occurs, and with whom the child was speaking. They can also record when and why the child avoided speaking. This data is processed to provide an ongoing overview of a child’s anxiety and attitudes toward speaking so that the speech therapist can better customize his or her therapy.
Helpful Links
A helpful link that illustrates the age that sounds are mastered by.
http://mommyspeechtherapy.com/wp-content/downloads/forms/sound_development_chart.pdf
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)
An article explaining the difference between "Speech" and "Language" published by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
http://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/language_speech.htm
National Institutes of Health: Autism Fact Sheet
A Website about Autism that is published by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/autism/detail_autism.htm
The Stuttering Foundation
A website for families with children who stutter, including resources, services, and support.
http://www.stutteringhelp.org/
Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
A guide for families with children who struggle with ADD/ADHD providing a supportive network, continuing education, and evidence-based information about ADD/ADHD to parents.
Apraxia Kids
Resources, services, and support for families with children who have Apraxia.