Review: Clue Catcher teaches the skill of inference to find word meaning.
Bottom Line: This app teaches the all-important skill of understanding word meaning through context. Although it would be nice to choose which vocabulary words are used for each grade, the app is easy to use and breaks down the process of of how to infer meaning in clear and easy to understand steps while tracking right and wrong answers for more than one student that can be marked for additional review.
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Eleanor gives us a demonstration of how this app works below. Take a look!
The app opens and gets straight to business. First, a student is named, then a grade is chosen between third and tenth and finally a short description can be added which does not appear while students are using training. After a profile has been created, the fine art o inferring meaning begins. The app opens to a window that shows a word at the top of the page which will be the focus. Below the word is a sentence that uses the focus word. For instance, I created a profile for an eighth grader and the vocabulary started with the word, "amends" and below it was the sentence "She tried to make amends for snapping meanly at him, by baking him his favorite cookies." In the upper left of the page are two arrows. One points left and the other points right. By pushing these arrows, new words can be shown or the previous word can be shown again. Below that are three buttons. First is "highlight words" that helps students find meaning from what is written. In this example, it highlighted, "make", "snapping meanly at him" and "baking him his favorite cookies". The next button is "think clues" which asks questions about what the student has read, "Why did she make him cookies? What did she want to happen?". By answering the think clues, the student is another step closer to understanding what the word means. Finally there is a "show choices" button which will give three short definition choices and one of them will have the best meaning. For " amends" the choices are, ""change for the better", "disagree" and "infuriate". If a student chooses incorrectly, a buzz is sounded and the student is told the choice is incorrect. If the choice is correct, a positive note is sounded and the child is told the choice was correct and then the app advances to the next word. Also on the page is real-time tracking of correct or incorrect choices, the ability to mark words for later review, a question mark that explains what each button does and the student name which can be used to edit the student settings or exit to access a different student.
Users do not have to use each of the hints that are given. If a child is good at inferring meaning for a word, they can simply press the "show choices" button to answer but if they need help, each sentence is cleanly broken down to help teach this skill. I had my rising fifth-grader sit next to me and play while I wrote this post and saw that although it can be used without help from a parent, tutor or teacher because of the clean design, understanding how to really get the most from this app requires someone that will help the student to correctly pronounce some of the words and even provide meaning to the choices being offered as definitions.
In the free download, five words are included for each grade level. Single grades can be purchased, double grade levels can be purchased or a simple full version of all grade levels of $12.99 can be purchased. The options are nice to have depending on the desired use of the app since a teacher will have need for a specific grade level while a parent might have children in more than one grade and still, some teachers or therapists may desire having access to all grades.
While tinkering with the app, I really appreciated the simplicity of design. There are no distractions from the whole point of the app which is to teach how to infer word meaning from sentence context. There were no bugs or technical oddities either. I did wish that words could be narrated since hearing a word also helps with committing something to memory as well as recalling it at a later time. Marking words for review later doesn't seem to do much different than the incorrect data that's counted for a student. Clicking on the words that were wrong will show those words, then by selecting one of those words, it is shown again. Same goes for marking for review. The only help this might be is if a child struggles with the meaning, but still gets it correct. A parent of teacher can mark it and return to it another time. Also it should be noted that returning to any word does not show a new sentence or choices.
Overall, the app does what it claims to do while offering plenty of options for purchase without a lot of distracting bells and whistles.
*****
Cynthia's mom taught her what the word, "sesquipedalian" means a long time ago and she never forgot. *Smart Apps for Kids was paid a priority review fee for this post.
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