Introducing, Articulation Scenes!

I was so excited when Smarty Ears Apps contacted me to try out their top articulation app, Articulation Scenes!

 This app follows an adorable "theater" theme.  Your students are the players or performers in the game.  You can input students names and photos. 

 This app has 1200 words to work on the following sounds:  p, m , h, w, n, b, d, y, t, k , g, ng, f, ch, j , l , r, v, s, z, sh, th.

 When you select a target sound for a student, you can decide which word placement, blends, and more for sounds like /r/.  Each target placement utilizes a different scene.  There are 72 scenes all together!  The themes of the scenes are cute, fun, and motivating for students.  I tried this activity out with my guinea pig, my 5 year old student.  He is working on the /th/ in the final position.  Watch as I used this activity to address his needs.  I scrolled to the final /th/ scene and clicked. 

 For each scene, there are 4 different activities:

 1. Find the hidden items: Allows children the opportunities to listen to targeted words and find them on each scene. I will say, this was a bit difficult for my student due to the difficult vocabulary.  As a nonreader, I clicked each word to prompt him to repeat it and try to locate it.  When the vocabulary was too difficult, I gave clues to help him locate it using prepositions and descriptions.  As my student found the items, the words on the bottom disappeared.   This was so motivating (and helpful to know how many were left to find)!

 Once all items were found, he was rewarded!  Yay!

Tap and say it: Children tap on the items on the scene, which are isolated allowing the therapist to track and monitor their productions.  My student was able to click the item from the scene, hear it, and say it.  He was able to record it and rate his own productions as he listened to it played back.  This features is great for data collection, drilling, and self monitoring.

 The movie theater: Children get the opportunity to listen to a story using the target words.  I switched over to initial /th/ to show you!  The telling of the story was great for auditory bombardment.  This was great since my student already mastered this placement.  We were able to work on describing and wh- questions while recording and listening!  You can definitely use this activity with students with multiple goals!!  I recommend providing visuals of the vocabulary/articulation targets and have the student tap them as they use them to tell the story.  This feature also taps into auditory comprehension since students have to recall the story they heard. 

 As you can see, students have the opportunity to create their own or use a script.  Since my student cannot read, I just had him tell a story on his own with my prompting and asking questions.

 The production room: This is the activity that allows children to either create their own stories, record them and continue to practice.  Now students can be creative to make their own story without listening and recalling.  It is important to prompt students to locate the items in the picture with their sound.  They should be reminded to use these items to tell their story. 

 Other sounds and scenes:

 For each sound, there is a homework document.  This is great for easy printing for homework or printed drilling pictures.  These pictures correlate to the activities worked on in the app.  This was easy to share for printing!!  LOVE this feature!!

 The "Lounge Room:" You are brought to this at the end of a session or you can go directly from the main page.  This is where you can locate student score reports and "rewards."  Just click the student's name to retrieve the information.

 You can access their trophy case.  Unfortunately my student didn't receive any trophies :(

 You can also access their progress report.  Here you can share results via email or printing.  You can also relisten to their recordings if you want to analyze for language or articulation samples.  Another amazing feature!

 Things I like about this app:

• Motivating scenes and activities
• Wide variety of phonemes to work on
• Recording feature for self monitoring and correction
• Homework documents for easy sharing with teachers and parents as well as carryover homework
• Score reporting and monitoring
• Ability to use and create speech samples for later analyzing

Things I would like to see in an update:

• Ability to use with multiple students at a time
• Ability to preselect the specific targets used if you do not want to use all

Overall, I think this app is great!  If you have multiple articulation students on your caseload, I would definitely recommend this app for your wish list!  It has gone down in price, only $19.99 at this time.  Visit iTunes to learn more!