Special Numbers User Guide - Introduction

This guide currently describes editions of Special Numbers that are no longer available or supported. It will be updated when the new edition, Special Numbers Plus, is released.

Special Numbers contains a set of activities to help develop early number skills, on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. We have designed the app in collaboration with parents, teachers and educational psychologists, and taking into account research into how children acquire mathematics skills.

All the activities are intended to be accessible and hold the attention of children with learning difficulties including Down syndrome, autism, poor fine motor skills and hearing impairment, as well as being appealing to typically developing children. Special Numbers is suitable for use at home, at school, in nursery or kindergarten, and in therapy sessions.

The app has a number of configurable settings, and it is important that you make use of these to match the activities to your child’s ability and inclination. In particular, the default sound settings for some of the activities may be too easy for your child and ‘give away’ the answers. Refer to Chapter 3 for more details.

The current version supports English (both American and British), Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Turkish: we plan to add more languages in future updates.

By using profiles, you can replace sounds and text with your own recordings and words in any language, have different settings for each child, and transfer customisations between devices. See Chapter 10 for an explanation of profiles.