Supporting Young Learners with Talkie Tot

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of creating over 50 apps that have helped not only the children of friends of mine but also the children of millions of strangers worldwide. Four years ago, I had the inspiration to create the first app designed to help my young son, Victor, who at the time was only 1 year old. I created and published, GoWords, a simple app designed to support his vocabulary development in both English and Portuguese.

Now that I have a three-year-old, Alice, who was facing a language delay and struggling to start combining words to make short phrases, I decided to create an app for her. This week, Talkie Tot app has been released on the App Store, and I could not be prouder of this product.

Talkie Tot is special not only because I created it with a special person in mind but because I had a very special person help me on this project: my very own son. Victor recorded all the words and phrases used on the app. I made the decision to use his voice because he was always so much more motivating to Alice. We all know children often learn better from their peers, and I want to use that to our advantage.

Talkie Tot is incredible because it includes a photo that represents and provides context for the target phrases, but most importantly, each word is represented with symbols. We used Smarty Symbols which makes Talkie Tot a great tool for AAC learners.

The app has three separate levels: Core Phrases, Talkie More, and Action words. The Core Phrases is my favorite as it provides a variety of phrases both parents would love to hear from the kids, like “Love you” and important safety phrases such as “help me.” The action word phrases also provide important basic vocabulary knowledge of nouns and adjectives.

My plan is to create smaller versions of Talkie Tot with other phrase types and apps that support the expansion of utterance length.

You can try the very first level of Talkie Tot for free on the App Store.

I am super happy to report that Alice is now ready for our three- to four-word phrases and sentences level, so I guess I have to get busy and start working on that app!