Hidden Curriculum for Kids
Practical but wordy app helps kids learn social skills.
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Hidden Curriculum for Kids
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A Lot or a Little?
The parents' guide to what's in this app.
What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Hidden Curriculum for Kids is a flash card-style education app designed for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to help teach social skills. The app contains several dozen flash cards with practical, real-life scenarios and explanations of how to make good choices for many different social situations. The app can also prompt conversations to help kids and teens with ASD learn coping skills and problem-solving techniques. Favorite social tips can be shared by email or stored in-app for future use.
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What’s It About?
Hidden Curriculum for Kids offers several dozen flash cards containing ideas or scenarios related to sensory issues, self-regulation, social interaction, and academic skills. Kids open the app, and a flash card with text automatically opens. They can scroll through cards using arrow keys and choose whether the information on each card is useful to them or not. If so, kids can save the information in a favorites folder (designated by the yellow star). Kids can also email the information from a card using the in-app email button.
Is It Any Good?
HIDDEN CURRICULUM FOR KIDS is a good education app to help people on the autism spectrum learn important social cues. It explains how to maneuver through common social situations by offering kids, their parents, families, peers, teachers, and other professionals tips to spur conversations about successful social interactions. It can also help people from other cultures, or those recuperating from brain traumas, learn social norms and expectations.
The app falls short, however, on two key fronts. First, it's text based and lacks an option to have the text spoken aloud. Instead, it requires kids to either have solid reading skill or an adult to read to them. Second, there's no ability for kids or adults to make custom situation flash cards tailored to their individual needs, which potentially leaves important social skills unaddressed.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Talk about how facial expressions and body language convey what a person might be feeling. What if someone is smiling, or if their arms are folded across his or her chest?
Talk about how characters in picture books or TV shows might feel based on their facial expressions and body language.
App Details
- Devices: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
- Subjects: Language & Reading: discussion, reading, reading comprehension
- Skills: Thinking & Reasoning: applying information, defining problems, problem solving, Self-Direction: personal growth, self-assessment, self-reflection, Emotional Development: identifying emotions, labeling feelings, self-awareness
- Release date: January 27, 2010
- Category: Education
- Publisher: AAPC
- Version: 1.0
- Minimum software requirements: iOS 3.0 or later
- Last updated: August 18, 2016
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