Monday, February 25, 2013

No-Glamour Vowels {review & giveaway}

When the authors of, No-Glamour Vowels, reached out asked me to review their new book from Linguisystems, I jumped at the chance. I have several children on my caseload with Childhood Apraxia of Speech working on vowels and there is a shortage of vowel materials available.


The app was developed by 3 school-based SLPs. It features 188 pages plus a printable CD-ROM that includes an additional 176 printable pages of therapy materials! 

The book targets 13 different vowels including short, long and diphthongs. Each vowel sounds is targeted with the following resources:
  • Vowel Information Page
  • Word List
  • Activity Ideas
  • Picture Pages

The book includes a age of mastery chart for each vowel - information I hadn't ever had easily printed out to refer to! 

Start with the vowel screener. It includes pictures and prompts that the clinician has the student repeat. Score their abilities at the word, phrase and sentence level. 


The vowel information page contains information about spellings, age expectations and elicitation ideas. 


The Word List is separated by structures. 


The Activity Ideas are specific to the vowel. For example, playing a game with alphabet letter for the long 'e' sound. (9 letters of the alphabet end in the long 'e' sound.) 


Picture cards are included for CV, CVC, CCVC, CVCC in words as well as phrase/sentences. 




The book also includes extra worksheets provided on a CD. These include words sorted by syllable complexity for personalized practice.

So, what's the bottom line? 

Pros: I love that No-Glamour Vowels systematically targets the vowels with careful thought to the difficulty of the words. The book divides words by their complexity (CV to CCCVC.) There are so few vowel products, so a book with enough materials to target such a variety is a asset to most any therapy closet!

Cons: Although the book lists a page of activities for each vowel, I wish it had some simple worksheets to accompany each idea. That would be a huge time saver. For example, one 'long I' sound activity is to look at a map and talk about where you might drive.  I wish the book game with a map to use for this. If there was one activity included for each vowel those would be great ways to send home carryover work! 

The book is available from Linguisystems for $43.95. It's also available as an e-book download on the linguisystems website for 34.95 (a new feature!)

Disclosure Statement: Copy of No-Glamour Vowels was provided for this review. No other compensation was provided. 


The book authors, would like to give one lucky SRN reader a copy of No-Glamour Vowels! You can enter using the Rafflecopter below! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway