A few weeks ago, Elizabeth reviewed the Minimal Pairs app from Therapy Box. You can see her review here. Today I’m going to review another of their apps – Sort It Out. I was given a free copy of this app to review but the views contained here are all my own.
The first thing to say is that I’ve had this app for a couple of months now, and I’ve found I’ve used it quite a bit. The therapy goal of semantic sorting (sorting things into groups) is useful for lots of children and the theme of a train ride is also popular with many. Every child I’ve used it with has loved watching the train go round!
When you open up the app, you see the picture above of the train track going round an island. You can choose to go to settings or just play the game straightaway. If you choose play, you will see a truck deliver 8 boxes of cargo and then a train pulling into its first station (the beach). The boxes open so that you can see an item in each one, and you see the two groups that they need to be sorted into. Here I have put two fairly similar groups together (vegetables and drinks) – this can be fully customised in the settings.
Each picture can be dragged into the right group. When they have all been sorted correctly, you will see this screen and hear a cheer.
Then the train moves on to its next station, and a new truck arrives with cargo. The journey is only short but there’s lots happening in the scenery as the train passes that you can talk about with the child if you want to. There are 4 stations altogether so you can sort 8 different groups altogether.
It’s great that there are so many things that you can customise about it. You can change the names of the stations, and choose which categories you want to appear at each station. There are 17 categories programmed in and 12 items in each one. If that is not enough variety, you can also add your own categories and add your own items into existing ones too.
There are lots of other things you can change too. You can have text only, picture only or both. You can switch the music on and off. You can also email the results if you want to.
In summary the best things about this app are
- Great animation that kids love
- Fully customisable for different levels
- Enough vocabulary included that you can do it lots of times with the same child.
- Add your own vocabulary and pictures easily.
Ideas for the future:-
- It would be great to be able to do more really close categories (eg farm animals vs zoo animals) as well. There are some options to do this however, eg fruit vs vegetables.
- It would be nice to be able to choose the number of stops on the journey. However, this doesn’t really matter, as you can always stop the game part-way through.
This app costs £10.99 ($13.99) in the app store. It includes a wide range of pictures and lots of options to make it really flexible to each child’s needs.
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