We are very excited to announce that we have added one more activity to our collection of games for Smarty Ears Online. This week’s new activity is called Describe it to me.

Describe it To Me is a fun, multi-level game that is added to help improve the receptive and expressive language skills in children and adults. Designed by a certified speech-language pathologist, Describe it To Me employs a game show atmosphere to engage clients in their learning while incorporating a variety of questions designed to help clients build a deeper understanding of everyday items. Designed to facilitate a deep semantic understanding, each picture stimulus has six (6) questions designed to probe and teach a deeper level understanding of these everyday items. In addition to teaching semantic knowledge to children, Describe it To Me can be used to facilitate rebuilding semantic knowledge in adults. Perfect for all levels from beginning categorization skills to deeper level language skills, Describe it To Me is sure to be a great app among online Smarty Ears Online games for the busy speech-language pathologist, teacher, parent, or caregiver.

The player whose turn it is will be indicated by their picture being larger than the other players with a large metal triangle pointing at the player. On the TV there is a stimulus image of an object that presents a challenge for the player to describe.

Each stimulus image has 6 different types of questions to elicit a description from the player that relate to the image:

1. Category
2. Parts
3. Visuals
4. Function
5. Location
6. Extra

These questions are displayed along the top of the screen with a golden droplet pointing at which type of question is being displayed. The question type can be quickly changed by touching a different type along the top. This allows for the opportunity to thoroughly describe each object from different angles before moving on to the next object.

INCLUDES BOTH RECEPTIVE & EXPRESSIVE OPPORTUNITIES

On the bottom right of the TV is a switch with a “Receptive” and an “Expressive”. Moving the switch to the receptive position gives the student multiple choices while moving the switch to the expressive position leaves the question open-ended for the therapist, teacher, or parent to analyze the response. The ability of this switch to be able to be changed throughout the language game allows an easy way of providing scaffolding if a student is struggling too much at an expressive level by switching it to receptive, or a great way to add a challenge by changing it to expressive; overall it is a great addition to our games and helps in data tracking for Smarty Ears Online.