Eye Paint My Diary is the latest in the Eye Paint series by Curious Hat. The others include Eye Paint Animals and Eye Paint Monsters. A while ago, I was contacted by the app developer, not to ask me to write a review, but to inform me about the launch of the app. It looked really cute, but I didn't immediately see the therapeutic applications. Just the other day, I was contacted again to let me know that Eye Paint My Diary had gone free for the day. I decided to check it out and was pleasantly surprised!
On first sight, the Eye Paint applications appear to be a coloring page type of app. The major exception is that, instead of using a palette and your finger, you use your iPad's camera to add color! When you open up the app, there's a caterpillar-type of creature along the side. Drag him up/down to see the different scenes you can chose.
I chose this one:
To fill in the color, simply tap the area you want to color, then press the camera icon. As you can see, when I tapped the cloud, my iPad was pointed at my stairs.
Here's the completed scene I finished before school the other day:
And these are the things I used to color the picture:
- Red Rainbow Stripe - student chairs
- Yellow Rainbow Stripe - banana
- Green Rainbow Stripe - pencil case
- Blue Rainbow Stripe - folder
- Purple Rainbow Stripe - hand sanitizer
- Clouds - cotton balls
- Bunnies - for one I used my gray table, for the other (and the ladder), I used my wooden desk top.
Just in trying this app for the 5 minutes it took me to create this picture, I thought of a bunch of ways it can be used in therapy!
- Following Directions: Give your students directions like these: Find something fluffy to use for the clouds. For the bunny, find something that you can read.
- Similes: Encourage students to create similes to describe their paintings. (e.g., "My clouds are as fluffy as cotton").
- Formulating and Expanding Sentences: Encourage students to create sentences to describe their pictures. Encourage them to use similes to expand upon their original sentences.
- Executive Functioning/Pragmatic Language: Encourage students to pick a scene and then make a plan regarding how they will fill it in. Encourage them to work together to decide what colors they want for each section and what objects they can find to create those colors. You can also have students leave your speech room and ask other staff members for assistance in finding objects (e.g., ask the gym teacher for an orange basketball).
- Carry-over activities: Use as a carry over activity for articulation or as an activity to practice voice/fluency strategies
What do you think? Can you think of any other ways you would use this app in your therapy room?
