Apps for Narrative and Comprehension Skills
Story Builder
Story builder, by Mobile Education Store, works on both narrative formation and comprehension goals. This was one of the first few apps put out by Mobile Ed so it doesn't have some of the vibrant animation you have become accustomed with in the recent apps It offers 50 story lines for the user to create a verbal narrative from and has 500 audio questions to help guide the building of the narrative. The stories can be archived and played back later in the user's profile. You select the level of play from 3 difficulty levels and then the user records their narrative-
- Level 1- Four questions about what can directly be seen in the picture
- Level 2- Seven questions about what can be seen in the picture and a few the user has make an inference or prediction about
- Level 3- No questions are presented and the user must make up their own story.
$7.99 available for iPad
You're the Storyteller- The Surprise
You're the Storyteller: The Surprise, by Hamaguchi Apps, is a wordless story book where the user watches a video clip of the story and then has to record or write their narration of the story. The app has a home version and a pro version, the difference being the pro version allows 30 user profiles to be created. The story has 8 chapters, each with a beautifully animated video clip, and when the narration of each chapter is completed you are able to watch the completed story while listening to the recorded narration. It has built in challenge words to use while narrating as well as some questions to help with making some inferences or predictions. There are a number of scenes throughout the book where body language interpretation and perspective taking occurs which is useful for working on social language skills as well.
Home Version $5.99 available for the iPad
Pro Version $9.99 available for the iPad
Story Pals
Story Pals, by Eric Sailers, is an app for listening and reading comprehension. This app is nicely designed and has wonderful animation that fosters the user's creativity. Even though it's technically designed for listening and reading comprehension I have found that it is also useful for narrative creation. The app comes with 24 stories of varying difficulty. You also have the option of creating and saving your own stories to the library. The picture below is an example of story that I created. Using the built in picture library you can choose from number of characters, backgrounds, and objects to place in your story. The story will be limited to one picture on the left and then your text on the right. You can record yourself reading the story or use the Acapela text-to-speech with highlighting option to read it for you. Once the story has been read you then take a "quiz' by answering a variety of ‘wh' (who, what, where, when, and why) questions. The app will track the accuracy of the scores and save it to a specific user profile so you are able to track the user's comprehension over time.
$14.99 available for the iPad
Peter and the Cat Narrative Assessment
Peter and the Cat, by Black Sheep Ltd, is a fairly comprehensive narrative assessment for children ages five to nine years old. The app is based on the second edition of Peter and the Cat assessment that was published originally in Australia in 1993 by SLPs, Leanne Allan and Suze Leitão. The child listens to the story as a voice over narrates it. While being recorded, the child then must retell the story using the pictures. Once the child finishes their narration the therapist then transcribes the story and performs an analysis. Keep in mind that this is not a norm-referenced test but it does yield a nice assessment analysis which describes the child's development of key narrative competencies. These skills are broken down into macro "story grammar" skills and micro "semantics and syntax" skills. So you can get a pretty good idea of what the child's key weaknesses are and create goals to target them. I have included 2 screen shots of the manual to give you a good idea of the look and feel of how the app works. I also encourage you to visit Black Sheep Ltd's website to watch the videos of the app in action.
$49.99 in the app store