Hot on the heels of Listening Power Preschool, is Listening Power Grades 4 -8+

Even though I have used the Preschool version with some of my older children, it is really fantastic to have a resource that is tailored with more advanced content to target this age group. Hamaguchi apps will be releasing Listening Power Grades K – 3 later this year to complete the series 🙂

Listening Power Grades 4-8+  focuses on language processing (grammar, vocabulary, narrative and question comprehension) and auditory processing tasks (auditory memory auditory closure, auditory figure-ground).  There are 5 different activities and each activity features three levels of difficulty (Easy, Intermediate, Advanced).

The Demo button on the home page takes the user through a detailed tutorial. However, the app is intuitive and easy to use. There is also an ‘info’ button, which provides detailed information about the app and hard copies of all of the stories are available at the end of the this page which can be emailed and printed for student use.

Settings

Activities:  There are 5 activities which are discussed in further detail below.

Answer Choices: This allows the therapist to select whether answer choices are displayed automatically or manually. The manual option allows the therapist to control the rate of progression through the app. It also adds an expressive language element to the app so that the student can verbalize their response before hearing/seeing the different choices.

Levels: The app will monitor the child’s use of the ‘hear again’ button and errors. If there are more than 3 errors, the program drops in difficulty. Selecting the Manual option allows you to keep the same level.

Reward Game: A ‘Knock ‘Em Down’ game serves as a brief break between activities but does not require any level of skill from the child and most children have opted not to activate this feature.

Track progress: Toggling this button on/off allows the user to select whether they student’s progress is displayed on the screen whilst playing on the app. I have found that many children become very distracted by their ‘score’ at the top of the screen and so the ability to hide this information is really great. A report can be generated after each session and can be emailed or printed. In addition selecting ‘play missed items’ in the report settings, allows the therapist to address any items that the student did not get correct from the previous session.

Error response: If the student makes an error ,  the selection is highlighted, but the response is not registered and the student must try again until he/she obtains the correct answer.

Text: Text can be turned on or off. For listening practice turn the text off, but it is a great feature to have to work on  reading comprehension.

Activities

Listening for Grammar

This task requires the child to select the item that is grammatically correct. Both morphology and syntax are addressed.

Listening for Grammar (text display on)

Listening for Fast Sentences

The student has to listen to a sentence that is spoken quickly and then identify which sentence matches it. This activity addresses processing speed, memory and auditory discrimination.

Listening for Fast Sentences

Listening for Meaning

This activity requires that the child listen to the sentence and infer the the meaning of sentence from the vocabulary that is addressed.

Listening for Meaning

Listening for Missing Sounds

This activity addresses auditory closure but it has also been great for discussing meaning of the incorrect sentences and why they are incorrect.

I used this activity with a child with Apraxia who tends to leave off the ends of words. It was such a great way of highlighting to her the errors that she was making in her own speech and encouraging her to practice the correct articulation at a sentence level.

Listening for Missing Sounds

Listening for Stories:

This task requires the student to listen to a story and then answer the questions. The questions address contextual information as well as true/false questions and inferential questions. There are 50 stories at each difficulty level. In order to increase the difficulty of the stories, the user has the option to add a visual distraction or a background noise option.

Visual Distraction:

This can be used when a child has specific difficulty attending to information when there are visual distractions. An unrelated animation appears on the screen when the text is turned off. The app automatically records the length of time that the visual distraction is shown on the screen during the activity

Background noise

Background noise that simulates a typical classroom environment can be used once the child is able to attend to the information and answer the questions without difficulty.  The volume of the background noise is softest at the easy level and loudest at the advanced level.

Listening Power for grades 4-8+ addresses a much needed gap for activities for the older child and as always the content and features offered by HamaguchiApps is superb!

Listening Power Grades 4-8+ is available on the App Store for $19.99

Hamaguchi Apps have provided me with a copy of this brilliant app to give away. You can enter to win on the rafflecopter below.
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Thank you to Hamaguchi Apps for providing me with a copy for review. All opinions are my own.