Grantie Bakes A Cake

App Description
Grantie Bakes A Cake is an original read along animated video story and picture book for emerging readers, beginning readers and readers who may need help, ages 3-9. Activities are: read to me, read along, read words highlighted, find the words, write the sentence. To get the best results from Write the Words the child should first be thoroughly familiar with and able to retell the story.
Grantie Bakes A Cake is by the mother/daughter team of Tarsha Stacke and Sudip Peterson. Tarsha wrote the original children’s story under the name Grace Bethel. Sudip animated the story as a short video, which has been screened at film festivals in Kentucky and Pennsylvania and has now evolved to this app.

Story synopsis
Grantie’s grandmother comes for a visit. She brings a huge hatbox filled with cookies, cupcakes, pies and a cake. When mother and grandmother leave the room, Grantie decides to bake his own cake. Can you imagine grandmother’s and mother’s surprise when they return to the kitchen?

How to use
Children learn best when read to often. And those children who are read to often benefit from listening to a story over and over again, becoming confident readers. Viewing the animated video with narration allows your child to read the story often and at their rate. The story offers your child exposure to basic language, simple sentences, repeated words and humor. Parents can help their child select from the various options; choose to watch and listen without text, or with words as subtitles or with each phrase or word highlighted. In our hurried lifestyle it is difficult for us to read as often as a child may want however the format gives the parent flexibility in being able to read and giving the child opportunities to have the story read to them. We recommend that the child does the activity with the parent or adult caregiver many times before doing it alone.

A caregiver can read the storybook aloud to the child. When the child is completely familiar with the story he or she is ready to try the Find the Words activity. The child picks the correct missing word from a short list. An older child will enjoy Write the Words, the child can copy complete sentence on each page using popup child’s ABC keyboard.

Write the Words has self-correction. After three incorrect tries word is filled in. After three incorrect words sentence is filled in.

“The single most important activity for building knowledge for their eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.” Report by the Commission on Reading, 1985

“Reading is dialogue with oneself; it is self-reflection, which cultivates profound humanity. Reading is therefore essential to our development. It expands and enriches the personality like a seed that germinates after a long time and sends forth many blossom-laden branches. People who can say of a book "this changed my life" truly understand the meaning of happiness. Reading that sparks inner revolution is desperately needed to escape drowning in the rapidly advancing information society. Reading is more than intellectual ornamentation; it is a battle for the establishment of the self, a ceaseless challenge that keeps us young and vigorous.” Daisaku Ikeda