Saturday, April 12, 2014

{Review} Minimal Pairs Academy

I'm excited to share yet another comprehensive, go-to app with you from Smarty Ears, called Minimal Pairs Academy!  This app is designed to help children with phonological sound disorders improve their speech sound production skills.  Both listening and discrimination abilities are addressed in this app that uses targets at the word and phrase levels.


First, you can adjust the settings if needed to customize the app for the student(s) that you are using it with.


Add individual players as you'd like.  This app can be used with up to four players at one time.


Next, select the goals that each student will be working on.  Examples of target areas include:

- cluster reduction (/l/, /r/, /s/)
- deaffrication
- final consonant deletion (broken up into various sounds)
- final devoicing
- fronting
- gliding
- initial consonant deletion
- prevocalic voicing
- stopping (broken up into various sounds)

Here, I've selected velar fronting to be the target.


There are four different ways that a student can work on their goal area.  First, is auditory bombardment where a student listens to a word and finds the picture to match the word.


Next, is auditory discrimination, where a student must choose the picture to match a verbally stated word that highlights the difference between the minimal pair productions.


Then, there is production practice where the child must say the targeted word.  The minimal pair appears on the other card, but if the student produces the targeted word correctly, then there is no need to discuss the other flashcard.


Finally, phrase completion allows a student to pick between two words to complete the phrase.


One of my favorite parts of this app is the detailed data collection.  For each task, the app tracks the following:

- process targeted
- correct answers with and without cues
- session length
- number of participants
- overall accuracy
- task type

Talk about detailed data collection!!


What I love about this app:
- The data collection is my favorite part of this app.  I love that I can focus on giving my undivided attention to the student(s), instead of also trying to collect data at the same time.
- With 25 different phonological sound disorder target areas, this is an extremely comprehensive app that targets a wide range of speech sound errors.
- With four different tasks to target errors, this app can be used with students with varying skill levels.

You can find this fantastic app to target phonological sound disorders for $19.99 HERE!  OR... You can enter the rafflecopter giveaway below for a chance to win a free copy of the app!!!


Disclaimer: This item was given to me for review.  No other compensation was provided.  The opinions expressed here are solely my own.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

No comments:

Post a Comment