Parents

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What parents are telling us about Phonomena...

“I bought Phonomena for our 5 year old son having seen it advertised on the internet. He has had an articulation problem with his speech and subsequently been diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder. Also his reading is not what we would expect and he seems to struggle with the basics (His younger brother started reading at 23 months.) I have found Phonomena to be fantastic. The first time we put it on and it 'spoke' the first two phonemes - which to us were clearly different – he had no idea they were different sounds. I was quite shocked to realise he found this difficult, and it certainly helped me to understand why he has difficulty with his speech articulation and reading. We have been working through all the different sound sets, and the programme really differentiates out what he finds easy and hard. For example yesterday we were doing 's' and 'sh' which he had a lot of trouble with. Now I realise why he omits the 'sh' sound from his speech. If he can't discriminate 'sh' from other sounds, of course he won't spontaneously make the sound in his speech himself. The programme seems well designed too - adapting to his level of discrimination, it gets harder whilst he can hear the difference and then easier again when he can't. I reassure him that it will get easier which it does very quickly. As a competitive / perfectionist 5 year old he finds this okay. He doesn't like getting it wrong because he doesn't like the sound when he does. This is useful - on another CD programme we have [Earobics - Cognitive Concepts’ flagship product] he likes to get everything wrong in a particular game on purpose to see what happens. I guess he's mastered that level, but it takes some cajoling to make him choose the next level up. Phonomena prevents him doing this by adjusting the difficulty level during the course of the game, so his learning is more efficient and effective. He also likes the visual cues of how he's doing with the ball moving up over the scale and he asks what the 'rewarding words' say. Because he tries to get everything correct an accurate record of his abilities / progress can be made for us to work on. I have found Phonomena to be very cleverly thought out, and, [having tried others] the only programme that I have come across that we can use at home to first elucidate where his weaknesses lie, and secondly help him listen to and hence learn the differences between the sounds. I don't know of any other way or place we would be able to access such a specific teaching tool. It seems sensible to get started as soon as possible, to give him the best possible chance of improvement. We've also found it easy to use - I would recommend it without reservation to others”.

Dr Jeanette Spencer, parent (purchased March, received October, has previously used a competitor’s product)

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“Phonomena was recommended to me by a parent. His son’s school uses it and they recommended he bought it for his son. He’d only been using it for a few weeks and said he could already see remarkable improvements”.

Gillian Easterbrook, parent, 8 yr old son

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“He loves it - he comes down from his room having been up there for a while all quiet, and I ask him what he's been doing. "Playing Phonomena..."’

Louise W. Oxford. Parent, son 9

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