Community reviews for Itsy Bitsy Spider - by Duck Duck Moose

It is a good tool to use with students with special needs for cause/effect, learning and engagement. Due the amount of images and graphics on each page, the child may need prompting to learn to touch the spider to continue the story. The amount of visual clutter and animation could make it more challenging for some learners with special needs.

As an adult watching a pre-K student use the app, I appreciated the fact that there were so many different "levels" of learning available. For example, a very young child or one with special needs could simply navigate through the familiar song by clicking on the spider. As I previously mentioned though, some students might need some adult prompting to get them started. A different child might count to 10 with the squirrel by clicking on him to gather more nuts on the roof. Another child may most enjoy listening to the information relating to nature provided by the fly throughout the app on clouds, rainfall, the life cycle of a caterpillar and more. I think that my favorite part of the app was the ability to record the child's voice and have it play back instead of the song. Not only was this fun, but what a great way to have a child hear their own language development! This would be perfect for ELLs and students with speech challenges. For those reasons, I see myself sharing this app with not only kindergarten teachers as a nice way to introduce students to the iPads at school, but also with our district ESL classes, Autistic support classrooms, and speech teachers. In reality, with the limited budget we have for app purchases in our district, these special needs populations are likely the only groups that would be able to obtain funding for a paid app anyway. Fortunately, I believe that these same students would most benefit from using this app anyway.