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Barn Door Four: Home Edition App Review

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App Name: Barn Door Four: Home Edition

Apps for Homeschooling 5/5 ApplesOverall Rating: 5/5

Mom’s Rating: 5/5

Kids’ Rating: 5/5


Recommended Grades/Ages: Toddlers, Preschool, Kindergarten, Grades 1-3

Skills Developed: Fine Motor Skills, Communication, Visual Performance, Sequencing

Available On/Price: iPad – free to download with optional $2.99 IAP for full content

Reviewed on: iPad

App Description:

Barn Door Four: Home Edition is an app that combines the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for helping autism spectrum and developmentally delayed children with a fun, playful farmyard theme. The app includes a 3.5 minute long introduction that teaches you how to use the app upon opening it, it also features a clear, easy-to-use design so most parents will be able to start using the app right away.

The app is divided into four straightforward tabs – Lessons, where you can access pre-loaded lessons, customized lessons you’ve saved for your child, and where you can create lessons. Statistics, where you can see your child’s results from the lessons they have attempted (unlocked with IAP only).  Exercises, where you can learn more about the individual learning activities that can be combined to make up the lessons.  The final tab is for a well-written and illustrated help screen.

Twenty-nine learning exercises are provided in four main categories: Communication Skills, Fine Motor Skills, Visual Performance Skills, and Sequencing skills.  These exercises are classified by difficulty level: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.   The app uses a barn-inspired character to guide and encourage children through each set of skills.  Mac the farmer’s son helps with fine motor skills, Pepe the pig works on visual performance, Lucy the sheep focuses on communication, and Ace the rooster  moves through sequencing activities with your child.

The exercises included in the free version are:

Fine Motor Skills:

Beginner – Sliding – Clean Up the Items

Beginner – Pointing – Pop the Balloons

Beginner – Pinching – Squeeze the Fruit

 

Visual Performance:

Beginner – Match to Sample

Beginer – Match to Sample – Identical to Non-identical

Advanced – Exclusion – Which does not belong?

 

Communication:

Beginner – Receptive – Point to the “BLANK”

Advanced – Intraverbals – Fill-ins based on Categories

 

You can use any of these fully featured exercises to create your own lesson plans within the app in both the free and fully unlocked paid version.

 

In the paid version you can also access:

 

Fine Motor Skills:

Beginner – Puzzles – 3 Pieces

Beginner – Rubbing – Shear the Sheep

Intermediate – Puzzles – 5 Pieces

Intermediate – Tracing – Draw Shapes

Intermediate – Sliding/Dropping – Pick the Fruit

Advanced – Puzzles – 7 Pieces

 

Visual Performance:

Beginner – Match to Sample – Non-identical to Identical

Intermediate – Match to Sample – Match with the same Category

Intermediate – Match to Sample – Match with the same Color

Intermediate – Match to Sample – Match with the same Shape

 

Communication:

Beginner – Receptive Language – Follow a Receptive Instruction

Intermediate – Receptive Language – Point to Functions

Intermediate – Receptive Language – Point to the Body Part

Intermediate – Receptive Language – Point to the Color

Intermediate – Receptive Language – Point to the Shape

Advanced – Intraverbals – Fill-ins based on Features

Advanced – Intraverbals – Fill-ins based on Functions

Advanced – Receptive Language – Point to Categories

Advanced – Receptive Language – Point to Emotions

 

Sequencing:

Advanced – Sequencing – Leisure skills/Self Help Skills

Advanced – Sequencing – Object oriented

 

The app includes 15 pre-loaded lesson plans that contain a combination of these exercises at varying levels.

Included in the free version are:

Beginner – Multiple Skills – Option 1

Advanced – Visual Performance Skills

You can also create and save customized lessons that include an individually selected number and order of exercises.  These exercises can also be interspersed with play scenes featuring the farm characters that Barn Door Four uses as its guides, providing interactive breaks and rewards for your child (Park/Playground, Classroom, Music Room, Getting Ready in the Morning).

When creating your own customized lessons you can specify lesson name, and add a written description.  You can choose whether to show previews of each lessons, prompts for each trial, and whether or not statistics for the first and second tials are recorded in the statistics.

Once an exercise is selected you can choose the number of times it is played (trial number) from 4 – 25.  You can also specify the time for any included play scenes – from 30 seconds up to 2 minutes in length.  The total estimated time for each lesson will then be calculated and displayed.

The app’s statistics generate quite a few detailed reports.  Reports can be viewed by recent lessons, recommended lessons, skills (motor, visual etc.) and even individual exercises.  You can see reports by date, time spent, and accuracy scores including number correct, incorrect, and overall accuracy. You can generate reports in all of these categories for a specific date range that gives this information in a pdf that can be emailed out of the app for your own records or to your therapist.

Other Notes: This app doesn’t include any advertising.  It does include external links on the help tab, email integration for reports, and an in-app purchase.

What We Liked:

If you’re a mom of a child with special needs, it doesn’t take long before you collect a huge slew of apps that address individual skills or topics.  An app for identifying emotions, an app for sequencing, an app for categorization, an app for developing pincer grip fine motor skills – the list goes on and on.  In all honesty – this happens even to moms with neurotypical children as well.

I’ve reviewed apps for children with special needs that do a good job of focusing in on a specific skill – what impresses me so much about Barn Door Four is that it includes so many exercises and skills AND that it does a good job with all of them.  The app does an authentically good job with its puzzles, tracing activities, squeezing fruit, balloon popping, shearing sheep, matching cards, tapping indicated objects, and much more.

I’ve been using this app with three of my children, who although they aren’t developmentally delayed still enjoy the playful barn theme of the app.  I’ve put together lesson plans including pincer grip, tracing, and matching skills for my preschooler, simple puzzles and sheep shearing for my toddler, and have let my six-year-old try a bit of everything. I really love that you can program individualized lessons based on your child’s attention span/endurance and use as many or as few play breaks/transitions as she needs with the interactive animated play scenes.

Not only does the research-based ABA methodology provided a solid, engaging way to practice core skills for special needs children, but the activities the app includes can also be used in any early education setting for toddlers and preschoolers as they develop finger strength, matching skills, vocabulary, and much more.

Do note that this is an app that you have to set up for your child, you just can’t hand them the iPad.  My toddler has been bringing me the iPad and asking me (you have to love it when they ask!) to start a lesson for her or to make her a new one.  While being carefully designed using the principles of ABA, it’s still very child-friendly with its bright colors and cheerful characters.  I’ll often sit down with her while she plays through the lesson exercises in order to start new ones for her when she’s finished.

Even the free version of the app includes eight fully functional activities that you can use to customize your own lessons – I really recommend you check it out and see how easy it is to create a customized learning plan (not to mention getting those exercises for free!)  The full app for $2.99 is a huge value for all that it includes – this single app provides an entire library of learning opportunities and can easily provide content that would require many individual purchases of more specialized apps.

What We Didn’t Like:

The home edition of Barn Door Four only allows for statistics for a single user.  I’ve worked around this a bit by creating lesson plans with specific children’s names in the title.  Statistics will still only display for one child.  A school edition will be releasing in the near future that allows for multiple users.  I’d also love it if the exercises tab directly opened individual exercises without having to include them in a programmed lesson in order to use them.

Overall:

Barn Door Four: Home Edition includes a wealth of economically priced, well-designed exercises (29 in all) targeting fine motor skills, visual performance, communication, and sequencing designed to support children with autism and other developmental delays.  Parents will appreciate the ability to engage their child with a large collection of activities, create customized lesson plans, and to generate a wide range of reports (full version only).

Download this iPad app now for free  (optional $2.99 IAP)!
Barn Door Four: Home Edition - Learnitech, LLC

Have you downloaded this app?  Let us know what you and your children thought – leave a comment!


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