Thursday, February 14, 2013

La Maison que Jacques a bâtie

La Maison que Jacques a bâtie, $1.99

I love this app! To start off with, I love its simplicity and vintage look. And it is multi-lingual too, which is wonderful (English, French, Italian, and Russian).


On the first page, if you click on the arrow at the bottom, you will have several options:


The best option is the "Vocabulaire". Here, you can hear the words to learn them when you touch the images:


A great feature in this app is that you can switch from language to language on the same page (you don't need to always go back to the beginning). So a child can hear/read the story in French first, then click on the British flag to hear the same page in English. I LOVE this!

Once the story begins, there are sounds effects and a little bit of interactivity a child can discover by clicking on different things on the page (cats meow, dogs bark, the rat blinks his eyes, that kind of thing). There are also some puzzles to play:


In this one, the child has to drag the images to the right spots. There is no sound to go with this, which is too bad (it would be nice if you could hear the word when you touch it). However, you could certainly ask the child to just say the word.

There is a choice of jigsaw puzzles:



Once the puzzle is complete, you could ask questions about the image. There is also a colouring option of 4 pictures:


You could have the child describe what he/she is doing "Je choisis la couleur bleu, et je colorie la porte", etc.

In sum, I find tremendous potential in this app. It will appeal to the polyglots in your family, and the price definitely makes it a good value.

Below is a short video clip of this app, or click here to view it on YouTube.




My rating: 4 out of 5 stars. 

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