Speech Therapy App: Building Speech and Language Skills With “Nighty Night”

SPEECH THERAPY APP: NIGHTY NIGHT BY FOX & SHEEP 

Nighty Night is a great app by Fox and Sheep for the iPhone or iPad, Android or Kindle. It is a simple story that keeps young children engaged with narration, music, sound effects and cute animals that come to life on the page. It tells the story of seven animals going to bed in and around a farmhouse. As the children visit with each animal, they can interact with it to help it settle in for the night. Children get to choose the animal that they want to put to sleep first and continue putting the animals to sleep one at a time.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The story starts with a farmhouse with many areas that are lit up for children to explore. Children find each animal by touching a window with a glowing light. They then tap the animal to hear its sound and help it to settle down by finding and then turning off the light switch. While the goal on each page is to help the animal fall asleep, there are lots of things to explore before turning off the light. This is a great speech therapy app for building speech and language skills because children get a chance to interact with each of the animals to make the animals do various actions and make different sounds. The app comes with seven animals (dog, pig, sheep, duck, cow, fish and chicken), and additional animals can be purchased.

BUILDING SPEECH AND LANGUAGE SKILLS

Nighty Night targets a variety of speech and language skills, suitable for toddler and preschool children:

Early speech Sounds – If toddlers are just learning to talk, animal sounds are a great way to practice early developing sounds (moo, baa, and woof). When your child picks an animal to put to sleep model the noise that animal makes and encourage the child to imitate you.

Answering Questions and Following directions – You can ask a variety of questions such as “Who do you want to put to bed next?”, “Where is the baby chick?”, “Where is the light? “, “What did the fish do?” You can give your child different directions to follow in each scene such as “Touch his tail”, “Tickle his ears”, “Turn out the light”, “Pop the bubbles”.

Vocabulary – Great way of modelling different types of vocabulary such as nouns (cow, sheep, pig, house, water, light) verbs (eat, swim, pop, scratch, jump, blow, bark, yawn, stretch) descriptor words (fast, slow, cold, hot, big, small, curly, long, short) and location words (in, on, under, beside, behind, up, down).

Saying More – To help expand the length of what your child says you can model a variety of phrases such as “Good night pig”, “Fish is swimming”, “Wake up cow”.

Inferencing – Who is waiting next behind the light? Give your child clues to see if they can guess what animal that will come out next. “It is something that is pink, has a curly tail and plays in the mud” (Pig).

THERE’S A SEQUEL!

A sequel to Nighty Night, Nighty Night Circus starts by watching an owl settle down for a nap on a tree branch when the trumpeting of an elephant interrupts her. Following the sound, the owl discovers a circus caravan with their lights still on. The narrator asks the reader to help put the animals to bed by turning off their lights in seven locations.

It is fun to watch the scenes change once the light is turned off and the animations prior to turning the light out. When you meet the bear, he first growls at you and then giggles. If you tap him again, he pulls out a balloon, blows it up, and then makes an animal out of the balloon. When all seven circus animals are asleep, children will see that the owl has settled down as well.

 INSPIRED PRINTABLE 

You can also CLICK HERE for an inspired printable to go along with this app. This printable is created by David Sindrey, LSLS, Cert AVT.

Carrie Rosler is a registered Speech-Language Pathologist who has been practicing pediatric speech pathology for over 14 years. Carrie is committed to providing individualized family-centered therapy in a fun and supportive environment. Carrie has a special interest in Motor Speech Disorders and Auditory Verbal Therapy.