Speech Sounds For Kids - USA 4+

Carol Bishop

Designed for iPad

    • 3.8 • 4 Ratings
    • $5.99

iPad Screenshots

Description

Speech Sound for Kids is an iPad app for promoting phonemic awareness, auditory discrimination and speech sound production using a multi-sensory approach.

This app can provide many hours of speech therapy and early literacy programming.

It is recommended for children aged approximately 4 years – 7 years, however younger and older children may find it useful depending on their individual needs. The app helps children produce and explore the 22 consonant sounds of English using a multi-sensory approach. It also allows for the users’ results to be recorded and sent to their therapist or teacher. It’s perfect for home practice!

Each of the sounds is represented by a friendly little character called a Sound Buddy. With the help of the Sound Buddies, children learn to identify, discriminate and produce each sound – and they start to learn letter-links too! The program has a strong emphasis on developing phonemic awareness and articulatory awareness too.

Animated stories, videos of a child’s mouth saying the sound and Hand sound cues are all provided to help the child learn each sound. The child can record the sound or word and listen to how they went, and these recordings can be saved to monitor progress.

Children can play games like colouring the Sound Buddy (Touch when you hear the sound), Who said that sound? Who said that word? and matching games of varying degrees of difficulty.

In time, children become familiar with more and more Sound Buddies, thus increasing in their phonemic awareness (speech sound awareness) and understanding of correct speech sound production. Listening and production tasks are provided for both single sounds and also for each of the sounds in words. There are over 300 fun pictures to help with word practice!

Several sounds can be combined in tasks after they have been “studied” individually, allowing children to develop a strong awareness of the similarities and differences between sounds.

Phonemic awareness (speech sound awareness) has a causal relationship to reading and spelling development. When children become aware of individual sounds in words, they can begin to “map” them on to letters. Articulatory awareness is the knowledge of the articulation required for each sound. Studies show that individuals with dyslexia have weak articulatory awareness and training in this domain can increase performance on literacy tasks.

The Goals of the App

1) To help children learn about and practise specific sounds required for clear speech.
2) To heighten children’s awareness of sounds (phonemic awareness) which is vital for speech therapy tasks and which is a strong predictor for success in literacy-learning
3) To heighten children’s articulatory awareness and auditory awareness of sounds (phonemes) which has been shown to assist children who have reading difficulties.

Scope of the App

There are five main parts to the app which work towards achieving the goals listed above. They are:-

1) learn to identify and make a specific sound (as represented by a Sound Buddy)
2) learn to identify and make specific sounds in the first position of words
3) learn to distinguish and produce different sounds (from the current set of sounds being studied) .
4) learn to distinguish and produce different sounds in the initial position of words (from the current set of sounds being studied)
5) build a bank of familiar sounds that can be identified and produced as single sounds and also in the initial position of words

This is the North American (US) voice version. An Australian voice version is also available in the App Store.

What’s New

Version 1.3

Fixed a bug where recordings were not being automatically replayed when complete
Updated to support the latest devices

Ratings and Reviews

3.8 out of 5
4 Ratings

4 Ratings

Anna Bordon ,

Nice Features

I selected the application for the features related to demonstrating how to form the sound. My son takes speech therapy twice a week so this is to supplement what the therapist is teaching him. I have several speech apps which we are using today and will continue to use in conjunction with this app.

Pro:
- demonstrates how to physically produce the sound
- presented in a fun interactive way
- the ability to select multiple letters to compare sounds is useful

Cons:
- the recording duration is too short. My son takes time to form words and often the recording has stopped before he has said the word.
- navigation is average and takes some getting used to. I found I was getting lost in the application and not exactly sure what I was working on.
- the app only includes 22 letters...it would be nice to have the entire alphabet and more combined letters

Overall I would recommend this application. it is better than most that are available for an iPad. Since it is new, I am sure it will have many updates with improved features.

Stacey59 ,

Great for kids who are learning their letter sounds.

I’m an Orton-Gillingham Tutor and I use this with my grandson who is moving into Kindergarten. This resonates better than anything I’ve tried. So many activities with so many options, he’ll never get bored.

Momofjulia34 ,

Robust app, easy to use with my son

This is an extremely robust and easy to use speech app. As a parent wanting to work with my child at home, I feel confident in my ability to navigate and properly use the activities. With the ability to share statistics easily via email, it could be a great app for use jointly at home and in therapy sessions. Each time my son and I work with the app, I feel like I discover a whole new layer and opportunities to help further develop his language skills. I was truly blown away by how much this app has to offer. It is comprehensive enough to be useful to therapists, but easy enough to navigate for use at home.

App Privacy

The developer, Carol Bishop, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Collected

The developer does not collect any data from this app.

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Supports

  • Family Sharing

    Up to six family members can use this app with Family Sharing enabled.

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