Tessa's iPad ~ What a Gift!

Here's Tessa playing her Forest Friends Piano app on her iPad! The app has pictures of a Forest Friend on each piano key, and when she taps a key the little Forest Friend floats out of the top of the key like a bubble. The black and white keys are the perfect color contrast for her and not only can she hear the music play, but she can see the result of her touching a key by watching the little bubbles float up. Such a great app!

A couple of Tessa's other favorite apps are the Baby Touch Peekaboo app and Happy Babies app. The colors are so vibrant and perfect and all Tessa has to do to read a story is to keep tapping the screen. Each time she taps the screen the story will continue. She has actually gotten to the point where she knows the stories so well that you can sit and watch her predict with her eyes where the next action will come from. For example, on the Happy Babies - Play Farm babies, it says "Hello Mommy Sheep" then it says "Where are your babies?" and then from the right side, the little lambs come bouncing onto the screen and it says "Hello, bouncy lambs!". It is so amazing to watch Tessa anticipate where the babies are going to show up in each part of the story. Such a clear picture of how much she is really understanding these days.

Our next undertaking with the iPad will be to start incorporating communication apps. It will be a matter of consistency, but we hope to start using the "Yes/No" app and the "Verbal Victor" app. The Yes/No app is just that, a screen that has a big green box with "Yes" and a big red box with "No". This app will give us the ability to reinforce Yes and No and also begin to teach her how to communicate them to us. The Verbal Victor app gives us the ability to upload pictures of Tessa's stuff: her pacifier, bottle, baby food, juice, any of her toys, and even a picture of her stroller outside. The goal will be to present 2 pictures to Tessa at a time and begin to let her make choices by touching one of the two pictures on the screen. With the Verbal Victor app, we are able to record our own voices saying what each object is...so when she is choosing an object, not only will it be her very own item, but it will have our voices speaking what the object is when she chooses it. Our goal will be to have Tessa start making choices regarding what she will wear, where she would like to play and what she would like to play with, and choices to let us know when she is hungry or thirsty and what she would like to have.

It is all a process, but we are so excited to have the exact tool that we need to get going. We don't know where we would be without Tessa's iPad. It opens up a whole new world of independence, play and communication for our little smarty-pants!!!

~Whitney