Product: SoundLiteracy
By: 3D Literacy, LLC
Format: iPad App
Category: Education
Cost: $24.99
Focus: A tool to use with your current Orton-Gillingham influenced reading program.
Description: Sound Literacy is intended to facilitate interaction between a teacher and student(s). An instructor is needed to demonstrate concepts and skills as well as guide practice sessions with student(s). Sound Literacy can be used in conjunction with any curriculum that emphasizes phonemic awareness, phonological processing, systematic phonetic instruction, or word building with ‘meaningful word parts’.
Features:
• Blank tiles for counting, ordering, and manipulating the phonemes within words
• Tiles organized in pantries and ready to be pulled onto the workspace for spelling words
• A workspace for ‘tapping’ and creating boxes for the tiles to be placed in
• Six specially designed ladders for building and comparing phonemes
• Unique phonetically ordered consonant and vowel phoneme maps
• Popovers on the sound maps that indicate various ways to spell each phoneme; spellings are ordered from the most common to the least common
• Included on the popovers, are the origins of some spellings which help to categorize and make sense of a seemingly irregular spelling system.
What do I think?
I think it is one of the best apps designed for teacher/student interfacing for children with dyslexia you will find. If you currently are using an Orton- Gillingham influenced reading program such as Barton, Reading Horizons, Wilson, or even All About Reading, this app is a must.
Named one of the 12 Best Apps for Special Needs of 2012 by Teachers with Apps
What I loved:
- I can change the letter tiles to match the program I am using.
- No more tearing up pieces of solid colored paper and trying desperately to keep them in a baggie for the next lesson.
- No more cutting out letter after letter only to find that you lose one after each session.
- Easy to use.
- Fun for the child.
- Travels so much better than physical letter tiles.
- A tool that I will use for years to come.
- A tool that I can use with a beginner reader, struggling or not.
- I could use it with my other child for spelling practice.
- Can be used with any reading curriculum.
I know when we think apps we think .99 to 2.99 and better yet free. However, this app is not a game. It is not an app your child will file in “please delete for more space”. It is an app you and your child will use for each and every reading lesson from the first to the last. The last time I checked on purchasing letter tiles with a whiteboard it came to $42.00. Since you can’t buy individual lost letters, that becomes quite an expense. With SoundLiteracy there are never lost tiles. Now, if you are like me, and love to use both, it is still reasonably priced. I still use our physical tiles but now I don’t have to drag them all out for a short lesson or when we do school at the library or on the road.
Why doesn’t it have sound?
Yes, it is called SoundLiteracy and there is no sound. The sound in the name refers to the representation of English phonemes. If it had sound that would have been a turn off to me. With different accents, a program that instructs in pronunciation would become ineffective.
Final Thoughts:
SoundLiteracy, is the most useful app for helping my daughter with dyslexia. Not only is it effective it seamlessly supports my current Orton-Gillingham reading curriculum. It is easy to navigate and provides multiple levels of learning making it an app that will survive years and multiple children.