Thursday is App Day- Word Wheel

Word Wheel was one of the first apps that I used with students. Students play this app by spinning two "wheels." One wheel has pictures of everyday words or animal words and the other wheel has the words that correspond to the pictures. The program includes an option for customization as well, if parents or teachers want to add specific words and recordings. After a few correct answers, the children receive a short reinforcer which can also be customized.

While this app is recommended for pre-schoolers and kindergartners, my older students with learning disabilities loved it as well. For $.99, Word Wheel has many ways to differentiate. Within the settings, there are beginning to advanced levels and the program fades out picture cues. When my students first started to play, they loved the shadowy pictures underneath the words, but my data would say that these pictures helped them learn how to read the words! As they played more, I changed the settings so that they received less prompting. What really impressed me was that my students were able to generalize their knowledge of these sight words in other reading settings.

I did not explore the customizing options for this app but I will be! If anyone out there has developed their own Word Wheel lists, I'd love to hear about them. In the meantime, even with just the lists of animal words and everyday objects, this app is worth the dollar.