Random House Children’s Books and the Sesame Workshop have joined forces to create Elmo’s Birthday Bash, a new storybook app designed to help improve young learners’ reading skills, and the latest in the “Step into Reading” series of ebooks.
The storybook is over 30 pages and features narration, games, and activities designed to foster toddlers’ reading skills. Children and their parents can use the storybook in three different ways. There’s an auto-play mode that features narration from Bob of Sesame Street fame, plus word-by-word highlighting and automatic page-turning. More advanced readers can read at their own pace or choose to record their own voice for each page to use as narration.
While reading, children can tap on any word to hear it read aloud. Some vocabulary words feature definitions and quiz questions when tapped on. The interactive games focus on upper and lowercase letters, phonetic values of words, and rhyming sounds, to provide a stable foundation for reading development.
Elmo’s Birthday Bash is available now for the iPad on the iTunes App Store for $3.99.
