One of the hardest early literacy skills for me to add into storytime is writing. Holding a crayon, coloring, painting—all these activities help children develop the fine motor skills they will need to pick up a pencil in kindergarten and begin writing, and it’s necessary to model this for parents. But I confess that I rarely think to add writing skills into the storytime mix.  So, since we’re on a storytime break, I went looking for something to remedy this deficiency.  Success! I discovered a fun app that helps with these fine motor skills, and I’m looking forward to including it in our play time after stories. It’s called Dipdap by Cube Interactive and is available for iPad ($2.99), Android  ($1.99), and Kindle Fire ($1.99). Dipdap is a little critter who interacts with a child’s animated drawings.

There are two sections to Dipdap:

1. There are 16 adventures available for play. A child can choose to play the adventure without interacting, or chose to interact by drawing. Dipdap wordlessly presents a scenario to the child, like trying to reach the stars. Little Dipdap jumps and jumps with all his might to try and reach the stars. Then, the dashed outline of a rocket is presented. The child traces the rocket outline (the outline can be turned off if desired), and can chose colors or any other add-ins he would like to draw. Then, Dipdap climbs into the drawn rocket and shoots off into space, bouncing off of stars as he goes. It’s pretty heady stuff for a cartoon character to jump into something you’ve drawn!
2. There is also a drawing sketchpad in which the child can draw anything they would like. Dipdap sits at the bottom of the page and watches the drawing, actively moving his eyes to whatever part of the screen is being touched. He doesn’t interact with the drawing in any way besides watching it, but the drawing can be “photographed” and saved to the pictures section of the tablet.

There are no in-app purchases, and there are parental controls that allow you to change the music, sounds, and guides.  I think that it will work well to give each child who wants the opportunity a chance to play one of the adventures.  They only last a brief time and I’ll be able to move on to the next child who wants a chance.  I love it when a storytime plan comes together!