In a previous post, we talked about the challenge of making\u00a0phonemic awareness activities for older students<\/a> fun and engaging. One idea was to train on words that are shocking like swear words.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t really feasible in a school or tutoring setting.\u00a0 So I thought, \u201cWhy not use clean<\/em> slang and words for things that matter<\/em> to older students?\u201d<\/p>\n Victoria was busily writing new decodable stories<\/a> for TAP this summer and I\u2019d finished adapting TAP for smartphones<\/a> and releasing an Android version<\/a>. I found myself with \u201csome time\u201d for a side project. 300 hours later, that project is\u00a0Funny Phonemes<\/strong>. It’s\u00a0an app for phonemic awareness training using clean slang<\/a> and pop-culture jargon<\/a>.<\/p>\n I quietly launched Funny Phonemes yesterday: you can get it on the App Store<\/a> or on Google Play<\/a>. It has a variety of phonemic awareness activities that allow students to practice hearing phonemes, identifying missing phonemes and arranging them into words. What words? Over 250 of them including surfing terms, social media lingo, school-yard epithets and, of course, a few terms worthy of Captain Underpants.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a built-in dictionary of the slang definitions of the words or, at least, the clean<\/em> slang definitions.\u00a0 For example,\u00a0nuts <\/em>is one of the words and has\u00a0multiple definitions. Some usage is not slang at all and so not in the slang dictionary: The squirrel\u2019s diet consists mostly of nuts.\u00a0 <\/em>Other usages are clean<\/em> slang:\u00a0Jump off that cliff!<\/em>\u00a0 Are you nuts? <\/em>The definition of this usage is in there.\u00a0Yet another usage would not be suitable for this app:\u00a0If he\u2019s not careful, he gonna get kicked in the…<\/em><\/p>\n Since older students in need of phonemic awareness training are necessarily struggling or non-readers, it was important to include a text-to-speech feature in the app.\u00a0 The slang dictionary entries and any instructions specific to the phonemic awareness activities can be read to the student by the device.<\/p>\n I showed an early version of the app to Tricia Millar of That Reading Thing<\/a> and That Spelling Thing<\/a> fame and she kindly gave me a lot of great feedback.\u00a0 One key idea was that attaching written symbols which aren\u2019t the correct spelling to spoken sounds could be misleading and even harmful to students who struggle with reading and writing. The phoneme tiles now have icons by default (text labels are available as a option…just in case).\u00a0 Thanks for the tip, Tricia!<\/p>\n While I\u2019m at it, I\u2019d like to thank Victoria<\/a>\u00a0for advising me on words that would be suitable for use in a teaching setting.\u00a0 That being said, I take full responsibility for every word included in Funny Phonemes.\u00a0 I’d also like to thank my eldest son Ben (a professional video game programmer and all-around great guy) for suggesting I add extra goodies and generally make the app juicier<\/a>.<\/p>\n One very important feature is the phoneme set editor<\/strong>.\u00a0 This is what allows you to control the phonemes you want to have your student practice. I’ve made a two-minute demo video that you can watch here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Phonemic awareness training is more effective if the spoken words are in the student\u2019s dialect<\/a>, so I\u2019d like to add recordings of native speakers representative of a wide variety of accents.\u00a0 For now, the “Cowboy” novelty voice is a caricature of Southern American English and “Britishish” of RP (Received Pronunciation<\/a>).\u00a0 (I\u2019ll let you figure out who speaks with a \u201cDark and Mysterious\u201d voice.)<\/p>\n When I\u2019m building apps, it\u2019s very easy to start thinking it needs just one more thing.\u00a0 This is such a common problem that it has a name:\u00a0feature creep<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve plenty<\/em> of ideas for improving this app. Hopefully users will also send me ideas that haven\u2019t even occurred to me.\u00a0 For now, I hope you\u2019ll\u00a0go get Funny Phonemes on the App Store<\/a> or on Google Play<\/a>. Let me know<\/a> how your older students respond to these\u00a0phonemic awareness activities. Are they\u00a0phat, sweet, def, tasty, sick, rad, cool, awesome, tight <\/em>or perhaps lit?<\/em>\u00a0#LiteracyForAll<\/p>\n Phonemic awareness activities that older students find fun? [TL;DR. Get Funny Phonemes\u00a0on the App Store or Google Play.] In a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[299,170],"tags":[647,645,646,440,439],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1213,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions\/1213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Funny Phonemes brings the fun!<\/h2>\n
It Takes a Village to Build An App<\/h2>\n
![\"Tiles](\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/52913-300x169.jpg\")
<\/a>You control the focus of these phonemic awareness activities<\/h2>\n
![\"Pro-literacy](\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/81210-300x150.jpg\")
<\/a>