Recent Reviews for Chalk Walk:
Children’s Web Magazine
“The great thing about these apps is they don’t stop you learning from the way you are taught in school. They just add to it and help you practice what you are learning on an ipad. As a Montessori teacher [...]
Read full review....The iMums
“Chalk Walk by Mrs. Judd’s Games is an app designed to teach your child pre-writing skills using a variety of games. Users must complete each mini game with two or more stars out of three to earn their letters and [...]
Read full review....Read all Chalk Walk Reviews
CHALK WALK… A GAME OF TRACE & CHASE FOR YOUR HANDS!
Chalk Walk is the first iPad game that teaches the pincer grip to help children succeed in school.
Many children are coming into kindergarten unable to properly hold a pencil. Since time spent drawing and coloring with crayons is now being swapped for screen time, teachers see that key fine-motor skills may remain underdeveloped. But screen time can also help solve the problem. Chalk Walk, by Mrs. Judd’s Games, is designed to give exercise to young children as they use a thumb & finger pincer grip to play this fun, innovative, teacher-designed game.
Typical iPad tracing games ignore this need for children to build awareness of hand positioning required for handwriting development. Chalk Walk helps focus a child’s attention on this skill and offers clever tracing lines that bend and twist before the player’s eyes.
Chalk Walk‘s colorful, fanciful maps offer children a journey through the unique sidewalks of places like Kitty City and Crown Town. Players collect alphabet puzzle pieces and chase prizes as they make their way to Silly Town, where they are encouraged to create their own designs with loops and squiggles that will give their hands—and imaginations—a workout. Video playback offers children a chance to study their own moving “chalk lines” and encourages them to try again, just for fun!
After playing Chalk Walk, we hope children are encouraged to practice their new skills by creating their own drawings with real sidewalk chalk. Active screen time is great for quiet times, travel or waiting rooms, but nothing beats engaging in real life activities in the outside world, and that’s just what Mrs. Judd’s Games motivates kids to do.
Update: July 2012
Chalk Walk is now two games in one! Children can now build better fine-motor skills through free-form sidewalk doodles as well as in the original tracing challenge. With colorful chalk and a variety of real sidewalk backgrounds, children will enjoy strengthening their pincer grip while flexing their creative muscle. As players collect the fun thematic prizes in our original game from each city, the prizes appear as stickers in their doodle game. Fun!
Chalk Walk Features:
- encourages fine-motor flexibility/exercise
- builds awareness of hand positioning
- choose left-handed or right-handed option
- clearly demonstrates/reinforces thumb-finger pincer grip
- alphabet puzzle pieces enhance emerging literacy skills
- animated tracing lines promote left-to-right progression
- photos of unique sidewalks inspire an awareness of beauty and diversity in our world
- fanciful maps point the way to pretend worlds and imaginative thinking
- endless opportunity to revisit, and refine one’s work
- video play-back motivates a child to study their progress in an active way
- reset button offers teachers and parents the option to give new players a fresh start
- New Doodle Mode for free-form drawing and creating sticker scenes
U.S. Common Core Standards:
K.RFS.1 – Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print, including following words from left to right, top to bottom and page by page, understanding that words are separated by spaces in print and recognizing and naming all upper-and-lowercase letters of the alphabet.
K.W.3 – Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.
K-12 W.5 - Within each grade level students need to be able to look at their writing with an editorial eye. Our video playback is designed to assist this process.
3.RIT.7 - Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key events occur).
Requirements:
Chalk Walk is only available for the iPad and requires iOS 4.3 or later.
How to Order:
Chalk Walk is now available for free at the iTunes App Store. Try it out and tell us what you think on Twitter, Facebook or by emailing contactus@kboomgames.com.
