iPad Apps for Language Arts: Disney Digital Storybook

iPad Apps for Language Arts

Disney story apps: Toy Story

Objective: Read with Expression and increase fluency.


Recently I had the opportunity to work with two summer school elementary age groups. It was a fun day for these students as I worked with the summer school staff to create a day of technology integrated activities focused on building language arts skills. For many of the students this was their first time working on an iPad and iTouches. We utilized several learning applications. For this blog I will focus on a iPad activity that was one of the students favorite.

During the activities students individually worked with one teacher on a iPad activity. We wanted to focus on reading with expression and fluency. Disney has several story books for the iPad. I choose Disney's Toy Story Digital book for a couple reasons. This application has a great recording feature and allows for individual and automatic page turning control. The story is written to express excitement and exclamation. The reading level was appropriate with a few challenging words for new vocabulary. Also the timing of the new Toy Story 3 movie out this summer added to the fun and familiarity with the story characters.

Each student was assigned to a selected page from the digital story to read. On average each reading selection was a paragraph of about 25 - 35 words and contained a combination of expressive and narrative sentences. First the students listened to the page read to them by the built in narrators voice. They were able to hear the selection read smoothy and able to see visually by the highlighted reading when the narrator read with expression. Then the students were able to practice their reading selection prior to recording their own voice into the iPad. They were also able to rerecord their voice if so needed or desired.

While the students worked on each of their reading selections they did not hear the entire story from the digital book. All of the students did understand the content of the story because of prior knowledge of the characters and movies. All students had seen Toy Story at one time. The fun part for the students is when they all gathered around for the story in it's entirety. Once the digital story with the students own voice recording was played the iPad version provided a unique experience for the class. When the application was put on auto page turning mode with the class recordings for narrations, the story also added theatrical background music and sounds effects.

The students enjoyed hearing their own voices and the voices of their peers. The recording feature and playback gave students confidence for their reading to be heard by the group. It was great joy to see some students who struggled with reading and reading in front of others to be excited for their readings to be shared. This activity and application was a success for increasing fluency, using expression, and building confidence with reading.

SJ3 Education