This Vacation Week, Take the Kids to a New Setting: Disneyland!

In the Northeast at least, February means school vacation week, and who doesn’t like Disney? Disney’s parks are based on its countless characters and, of course, narratives, and the company recently released a FREE iPad app that allows children to explore Disneyland. Disneyland Explorer (iPad only) provides a touch-navigable visual environment allowing kids to visit a huge variety of themed settings (Adventureland, Critter Country, Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and so on, and that’s only in Disneyland proper) as they tap to reveal additional photos, videos and music. The app is naturally designed to lure tourists to Disney’s parks, but in the process it provides a primer in the element of Setting, providing a context for clinicians to develop students ability to describe locations, themes, and even genres!

Exploring Tomorrowland provides a great opportunity to target setting description and graphic organizer use with use of MindWing’s Story Grammar Marker and Story Maps!

Link to Story Map: Click Here

MindWing’s Setting Maps are flexible and adaptable depending on which categories you choose to target with your students. Use of these maps with Disneyland Explorer would also lend itself to using a more inferential approach and describing with the 5 Senses!

After visiting Disneyland’s more traditional worlds, the app can also take you to “a bug’s land” (lowercase as the movie title was) and “Cars Land.” Any of the locations you visit would be accompanied well by books or movie clips that you can use to build students’ narrative skills.

For another take on Disneyland Explorer, check out this post at Smart Apps for Kids, with a quote: “My oldest son loves this app. LOVES. He has told me numerous times that this is his favorite app. Not his favorite free app. His favorite app...period.”

We hope you like it too, and enjoy your vacation...whenever it is!