Pre-K Home & Family Apps

Designed to Promote Pre-literacy Skills

We built, tested, and validated four apps to promote pre-literacy skills through dialogue and playful interactions between children and parents/caregivers.  These apps — Animal Antics, Photo Play, Small Wonders, and Vaivén de Palabras, a Spanish-language version of Small Wonders — were developed in collaboration with FableVision and GBH and released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They are available now for free!

• Download our apps
  • In the App Store: Animal Antics, Photo Play, Small Wonders
  • In Google Play
• For more fun ways to support literacy, check out our free printables with coloring pages, recipes, games, and more!

Learn more about the important role that families and caregivers play in children’s literacy development as well as strategies to try at home.

Engaging families and caregivers

Reach Every Reader created digital tools and techniques to equip families with knowledge about how pre-literacy and reading skills are developed and how to create a literacy-rich environment at home. Throughout the design and development process, we regularly sought feedback from families to ensure that we produced truly useful tools for families’ range of strengths and needs.

Technology to support early reading skills

Critical pre-literacy skills can be developed long before elementary school. To address this, many digital markets are producing educational products for children to play independently. However, there is much evidence showing how important it is for families to play an interactive role in their children’s literacy development.

The Pre-K Home & Family Engagement team focuses on creating tools that promote enjoyable and meaningful interactions between pre-school-aged children and their families. By using readily-available technology, we can support personalized experiences easily accessible by millions of families. 

Hear from Our Researchers

Reach Every Reader researchers sought to develop interactive apps for smartphones to encourage rich conversations between parents and young children. The team was led by Harvard Faculty Joe Blatt, Sr. Lecturer on Education, Meredith Rowe, Saul Zaentz Professor of Early Learning and Development, Paola Uccelli, Professor of Education, and Rosa Turco, children’s digital media researcher. 

Validated Results

Our apps were validated through rigorous studies with over one hundred family participants from across the country. Findings showed the apps elicited rich conversations between parents and their 3-4 year-olds. Further, when comparing conversations during the first visit and last visit, parents and children had more sophisticated conversations with each other over time. The significant increase in children’s language complexity was associated with how frequently the family used the apps in between visits

Two of the apps from this study, Photo Play and Animal Antics, were subsequently revised based on what we learned from the validation process. A third, Small Wonders, was then designed based on these research findings. All three apps are now available. 

Learn more about our validation study through a recent publication in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

Meredith L. Rowe, Rosa Guzman Turco, Joseph H. Blatt, Can interactive apps promote parent-child conversations?, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Volume 76, 2021, 101326, ISSN 0193-3973, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2021.101326.