Story Kit and Physical Therapy

Ed. Note: Though four SLPs started TherapyApp411, we have always aimed to have contributions from other disciplines.  Thank you to PT Stacy Menz for allowing us to repost this review from her blog, Starfish Therapies!

By Stacy M. Menz, PT, DPT, PCS

Board Certified Pediatric Clinical Specialist

I love books. I often use books in therapy as motivation to have kids reach up to turn a page or do something in order for me to read the next page. I even used a book that one of our OT’s had adapted and made it into a gross motor activity. That being said I haven’t found many books that I can use to facilitate gross motor activities (I would love any suggestions if you know of any out there). So I finally decided to make up my own stories that could include gross motor activities. So far I have only made one story but I have a ton of ideas for other stories.

I was about to download Pictello which will allow you to use photos to make a talking book. The cost of that was 18.99 which I would have paid in order to make these stories (ideas) floating around in my head but then I noticed StoryKit which was free! I figured this was a great way to play around with the idea and then I could always switch to Pictello if I wanted to. The only slight disadvantage is that StoryKit is only on the iphone (although you could just expand it on your ipad) wheras Pictello is on both the iphone and iPad.

StoryKit even let me upload the story so I could email a link to someone else. I thought I would share my first story with you (its not very creative but you can get some ideas for how you can do it). My thoughts are that the reward/treasure at the end is another ‘fun’ activity that the kiddo likes to do but is still working on their skills.

For some of our kids I also thought this would be a great idea to get them to help me create the story with the activities they are doing and it can be motivation for performing the task.

I definitely feel like other disciplines can use this too in order to work on the skills they want to practice but I was so excited that I can finally make my gross motor story books!