The Centre for Family Literacy has added even more activities to its free app Flit (families learning and interacting together) and it’s now available for both Apple and Android devices.
But using Flit doesn’t mean children are glued to tablets and smartphones. In fact, it means exactly the opposite. The app offers ideas for hands-on activities families can do together that incorporate literacy and numeracy.
“What the app actually does is talk about the day-to day things that you do with your children where you can, just by changing it up a bit, make it into something that’s teaching them about numbers or about words,” resource director Donna Lemieux said.
Examples include counting socks when doing laundry, measuring ingredients while helping with a recipe, taking a walk and reading traffic signs or simply using food colouring to write words in the snow.
“Fill a squeeze bottle full of coloured water and then go outside and you and your child can write in the snow,” Lemieux explained. “They could try to write their name.”
Flit has a total of 116 activity suggestions that fall under eight categories: books, rhymes, games, crafts, writing, numbers, cooking and reading.
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There’s also a section that explains how each activity strengthens literacy.
“Maybe you’re going out for a walk with your child and maybe you’re reading the road signs to them and saying: ‘What does that sign say? That says stop. What does that mean?’ So you’re demonstrating to them that a lot of things that are in their daily lives – the words have meaning and they have a purpose,” Lemieux said.
The app was developed in Edmonton with funding from TELUS Edmonton Community Board.
It also marks a Canadian first.
“A lot of the apps are more how you engage with the actual equipment – the tablet or the phone,” Lemieux said.
“Ours is different in that it’s not that you hand the tablet or the phone to your child to interact; we want the parent and the child to be interacting. That’s the key and that’s what’s unique about ours.”
Click here to download the free Android version of Flit. Click here to download Flit in iOS.
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