¡Animales Fantásticos!

Explore language while learning about critters.

¡Animales Fantásticos! Screenshot

Parents will find “¡Animales Fantásticos!” to be a fun way to teach children new vocabulary, ask and answer questions, and practice great articulation.

Learn about animals from many different habitats: house, farm, forest, ocean, jungle, grasslands, arctic and more!

Listen to the word by tapping on the Word button or on the picture, then use the record button to record your voice.

The Parentese button will provide a model that a parent might use with a very young child. For a longer model the child can tap on the descriptive buttons–Phrase, Sentence, or Functional Sentence.

This is a translation of the content of Wild, Woolly, Wonderful Critters. It can be used by English-speaking clinicians who have Spanish-speaking clients.

Target Audience: Great for early language development for Spanish-speaking children with speech-language disorders. The target language age is between 2-8 years.

Just $1.99 on the App Store.

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Information for Professionals:

¡Animales Fantásticos! is Spanish-language version of Wild, Woolly, Wonderful Critters. The app is written for English-speaking SLPs who have Spanish-speaking students.

This app has six stimuli for each of 120 animal pictures: word, parentese (gender neutral term coined by Robert Owens, 1996), descriptive phrase, descriptive statement, functional statement, and the initial sound of the target word. Habitats include: House, Ranch/Farm, Forest, Mountain, Desert, Insect, River/Lake, Ocean, Africa, Jungle, Prairie/Grasslands, and Tundra/Arctic.

A clear speech model is presented for the child to imitate and they can record and play back their own speech. The clinician can choose from three scoring methods. 1. Score each response as correct, distorted or incorrect. 2. Score responses as correct, distorted, substituted, or omitted. 3. Score productions based on whether they are spontaneously correct/incorrect or imitatively correct/incorrect.

Use the app as a starting point for a discussion with the child. Talk about real animals in the child’s environment that are similar to the ones on the app. Talk about what is the same and what is different between the picture and the real animal. Ask the child to draw and/or color a picture of the animal. Print the pictures and make a vocabulary book. Have the child play “charades” by gesturing the animal. Older children might be able to name other words that start with the same sound as the target word. The communication partner can select several pictures from each group and ask the child to categorize them by habitat as they play on the screen.

Generalization can be practiced by recording “spontaneous conversations” that have the target word used somewhere in the conversation. The record feature will allow several minutes of recording.

This app is based on the ¡Animales Fantásticos! game from LocuTour’s Palabras Básicas para Los Niños CD.

Rationale: This task requires the ability to attend to complex auditory stimuli and respond verbally. It encourages turn-taking, imitating, describing, questioning, answering, and playing with sounds and words. Learning these language concepts encourages verbal communication.

Read the Manual