Hello! We are happy to post a review on another wonderful Smarty Ears app. It is called Syllable Splash and it has an under the sea theme. Syllable Splash is an app for teaching the concept of syllable segmentation. We think that increasing a child's ability to recognize syllables in words can be a very productive activity. If a child can increase their ability to say one syllable at a time after seeing or hearing a word, that has been shown to increase a child's ability to spell words! That makes this a great app for early readers and spellers to use in order to increase their phonological awareness skills.
The fish, turtle, shark, and submarine pictures that are used all throughout the syllable counting exercise are both colorful and fun. In addition, the children are presented with colored pictures of real objects and people for the syllable counting task that is featured in this app. In fact, we read that Smarty Ears, LLC has provided over 1000 images for counting from 1 to 4 syllable words within this app. In our opinion, it would be hard for a child to ever see the same picture twice! That's a great way to keep students engaged!
Syllable Splash can be bought from the app store for the price of
$9.99. Other descriptive information is as follows:
Category: Education
Updated: May 11, 2013
Version: 1.1
Size: 340 MB
Language: English
Seller: Smarty Ears, LLC
Although Syllable Splash is designed to mainly practice the task of syllable counting, in our opinion, it can also be used for increasing spelling awareness, multiple syllable word reading skills, and for practicing verbal expression of 1 to 4 syllable words. We typically are targeting one or more of these goals with the students that we see at our speech clinic, so that is why we think this app is terrific!
To start, the teacher or therapist can choose to click on Quick Play, or to Select a Player. At the select the player screen, the Settings tab can also be found. In settings, you can choose to eliminate the buzz if an incorrect choice is made, the number of wrong options given, to have the level of difficulty increase, the words that are presented (1 to 4 syllable), and if you would like to turn the fish and shark animations off.
Once your settings are edited and a student is selected (an choose up to 4 students), then the game begins after pressing the Play button. This picture shows an example of one of the colorful pictures that is shown on the submarine.
To show the shark, we picked the incorrect answer of "1 syllable" in the word tractor. The shark comes out to eat that incorrect choice. Chomp! ha! That shark is fun and the kids loved seeing it!
To show another cute feature, here we have clicked on the counting syllable turtle. He is clapping out the syllables in the word, "thirteen." Clapping is a great teaching method for children when first learning how to count syllables in words. This cute turtle does a great job demonstrating that task and he is a fun character to watch!
If you click on the arrows at the top of the submarine, the word associated with the picture is displayed in large letters across the front of the sub. This is a great activity for reading practice and for letter recognition. Also, at anytime the picture can be pressed and the word can be repeated. This is a nice option for the child who needs extra verbal reinforcement. Finally, verbal expression of multi-syllable words can be practiced right after the word is given. The child can practice counting the syllables in the words along with saying the word out loud. A great activity is to advance the difficulty of the verbal expression practice of just saying the word by putting it in a sentence. For instance, I asked one of my older students to say the word shown in a sentence like, "I see photographs under the water." I had him use the same sentence over and over and we just filled in the blank after "see".
Press the Done button when you are ready for the child to end the exercise. The app does not end until you initiate that action. Once you press the Done button, you are taken to the report cord screen. You have the ability to share the results by sending them via email or by putting them in the Therapy Report Center. The Therapy Report Center is another app by Smarty Ears that is free and it is a for storing all of the data obtained for all of your students who have used the Syllable Splash app or any other Smarty Ears apps in the past. The ability to email the scores to a parent or myself is one of my most favorite things about the Smarty Ears apps. The parents like to see the work done in sessions and I like to keep a print out in my soft files to track progress with therapy goals.
Compliments & Concerns:
Syllable Splash is a colorful and engaging app that does a wonderful job presenting a wide variety
of 1 to 4 syllable words in order for the student to practice counting out syllables in words.
This app provides a nice visual model of how to clap out syllables to aid in the students learning.
Syllable Splash is colorful, fun, and engaging for children and it can be used for the pre-k to at least third grade crowd.
This app is good but limited in what it can do and the price is a bit high in our opinion.
We like how the app keeps track of the student's results, but we wish that tracking could be shown on the screen.
Students like to see how many questions they have done and how many more they need to do.
This app could be used for advancing vocabulary, spelling, reading and verbal expression skills. These treatment tasks could easily be recognized by a therapist or student. That makes this seemingly limited to one task app much more than meets the eye!
Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to read this app review. We are happy to let you know that you can enter to win one! Thank you Smarty Ears for your generosity and we commend you on the completion of another great app!!
Please enter the contest via the Rafflecopter contest below.
Best wishes and good luck!
Sincerely,
Manda & Shanda, SLP's
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