Hello and thanks for stopping by Twin Sisters Speech & Language Therapy in order to read this Smarty Ears Categories Learning Center App Review and to enter to win a free one!
Title: Categories Learning Center
Released: February 21, 2012
Seller: Smarty Ears, LLC
Current iTunes price: $9.99
What is Categorizing?
Categorizing is the ability to group objects or ideas into groups with common features or relationships.
Why Work on Categorizing Skills With Children?
1) Categorization skills can give a child more structure and organization to their day. Once they can categorize, they can better understand how concepts are related and that they can be related in different ways. 2) Developing categorization skills can help to increase a child’s thought organizing skills, problem solving skills, memory skills, and processing skills. Basically, working on categorizing will help to increase overall cognitive and language skills!
App Review:
Categories Learning Center is an app that is designed to increase a child’s ability to identify and to categorize an object by associating common features. It can help a child learn to sort items that belong to a certain category, and it can also help to increase receptive and expressive vocabulary.
Features That I Like!
- 1 to 4 players can play at one time.
- A variety of categorizing skills can be targeted at different levels.
- A multi-level expressive language activity is included (name the category aloud).
- Customizing skill level is available for either 2 or 3 category choices at one time.
- Progress monitoring is possible. This can be followed by the report that is given at the end of each session which can be emailed, printed or stored for later use.
Levels:
Level 1: Sorting of objects that are not similar. Sort pictures into into three labeled bottles.
Level 2: Sorting of similar objects. Sort 8 pictures into similar categories (field of 2 or 3).
Level 3: Where does it go? Place a picture of an object in the correct category (field of 2 or 3).
Level 4: Category Naming: Provide the correct category name for a group of objects without prompts.
Level 5: Category Selection: Identify which category name (field of 4) that a group of objects belongs in. Reading skills required for this level. 
Pros for this product:
+ I enjoy the age appropriate kid voices on the recordings.
+ The pictures are clear and colorful.
+ Repetition is provided by pressing the pictures shown.+ The pictures are clear and colorful.
+ It helps kids to think past general categories. For example, one category is not just, “animals”, but “reptiles”, and another category is not just, “household items”, but “bathroom items”.
+Cute ducks are colored in on the top of the pages to track progress. It is a great visual aid to see how many questions have been completed and how many are left to be tried.
+The ability to quickly see results at the end of each exercise.
+The ability to share results via air printer or email.
+The ability to change levels from 2 categories to 3 category choices.
+FIVE DIFFERENT EXERCISES TO CHOOSE FROM!! Great bang for the buck!
Want to win a free Categories Learning Center App?
Just leave a comment and your email address telling us what you like about this app or how you would use it in therapy, and you will be entered into a drawing to win one! The winner will be picked at the end of the week! Best of luck!! And thank you to Smarty Ears for providing this great app for our review today and the free one to one of our lucky followers. You guys are great!!
Sincerely,
Manda & Shanda, SLP's
Manda & Shanda, SLP's
Twin Sisters Speech & Language Therapy
Love all of the levels available to meet different needs! This would be great to use at my elementary schools. Lryoder at gmail dot com.
ReplyDeleteI like that it allows for progress monitoring and that it contains several different categorization activities.
ReplyDeleteLeah.Lawson@whitley.kyschools.us
This will be great to use with all elementary levels. I love that you can email the results. That is great for sharing info with parents and teachers.
ReplyDeleteI love that the student's pictures can be assigned to their individual progress. The levels and various activities look awesome!
ReplyDeleteLacey lhoff0@sowashco.k12.mn.us
The range of category choices and levels looks really good!
ReplyDeleteI love that you can email results to yourself and use the Therapy Resource Center app that goes with all the Smarty Ears apps!
ReplyDeletescheid.jordan@gmail.com
I love the progress monitoring feature. I like that it has expressive and receptive features. The levels and activities look great.
ReplyDeleteI love that there are levels of sorting! This would be great for my students! efhoffmann@gmail.com
ReplyDeletethis looks great...especially the multi player and multi level abilities
ReplyDeleteloriborsodi@hotmail.com
I love the multiple levels as I usually have different abilities levels in one group (especially my students with cognitive impairments). Thanks for the giveaway! sgiles@gpsbulldogs.org
ReplyDeleteI'vebeen working on categorization with many of my groups lately. Would love to introduce something new! Great graphics!
ReplyDeleteAdihar@neisd.net
This is so perfect for my pre-k students! Great giveaway!
ReplyDeleteLore
Hula_girl28@yahoo.com
This would be great for elementary students! I especially have one that has trouble with categorizing and when he learns things they don't seem to stick, I think he would really enjoy this!
ReplyDeletetaylor.rodgers@maine.edu
I like the pictures, different levels and progress monitoring options! This would be great to use in therapy with my elementary kids!
ReplyDeleteastreicher@lexington.k12.mo.us
I love the fact that it has lots of category choices and that it can be used in therapy to target expressive and receptive language skills. I have searched for some good category apps...but they seem to target a higher level that my little kiddos are not ready for! I would love to use this with my therapy groups and use the sorting feature.
ReplyDeleteWhoops my email is pearsonslp@gmail.com!
ReplyDeleteI love how it has different levels! I have students with a wide range of abilities so this w ill be perfect!
ReplyDeleteOops.. And my email is erinm.finn@gmail.com! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI have many clients working on both receptive and expressive categories. I'm always looking for technology (I.e. motivating) to help my students learn. Thank you for posting this review!
ReplyDeleteGtclark83@gmail.com
And the winner is....
ReplyDeleteSTACY P. CONGRATULATIONS!!
Thank you to EVERYONE for commenting. It was wonderful to read all of your thoughts on the Categories Learning Center app. Please stop by soon. We have another app review and giveaway coming next week!!
Stacy, please check your email for your code!
Sincerely,
Manda & Shanda