Open Better Speech and Hearing Month with Sound Uncovered

Sound Uncovered is a gorgeous free app for iPad that you can use as a context to introduce Better Speech and Hearing Month to your students. The app explores the science of sound through a variety of interactives that you can use to bridge discussions about hearing conservation. In addition, the app itself provides a lot of content that you can use for mapping expository text, as it presents much information about how sound works. This is also a key curriculum area in "energy, light and sound" type units of science.

A sampling of the activities:
Which Car Would You Buy- Presents sounds produced by cars and car parts and links these to purchasing decisions.
What's Making This Sound? and Sounds Like?- Have you listen to sounds or people's descriptions of a sound in order to guess what they are talking about (inferences!).
Eyes vs. Ears- talk about "listening with your eyes" while exploring how visual input helps us understand sounds .
Stop Me If You've Heard This One- demonstrates that you can't talk and listen at the same time! I have a lot of students that can benefit from that one...

That's where I heard it, and the age is right!

Ultimately, Sound Uncovered is probably best for older (upper elementary, MS/HS) and high-functioning students, but the interactives could be adapted for young students. Exploratorium, the interactive museum of science, art and perception in San Francisco, offers a similar open-ended app called Color Uncovered, which also looks to be a good context for eliciting language and description.

Common Core Connection:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.6.1d Review the key ideas expressed and demonstrate understanding of multiple perspectives through reflection and paraphrasing.

Hearing Loss Prevention Infographic

May is Better Speech and Hearing Month here in the USA, and MayMonth in Canada!  It's a good time to visit classrooms and conduct a lesson on hearing conservation (and if you have a graduate student, a great time for them to rack up a few of those elusive Aural Rehab hours).  An infographic is an interesting way to present information, combining pictures, icons and text (and often display information according to text structures such as categorical lists, sequences and cause-effect relationships); I found this great one on Cool Infographics:

Click through to the site to see the full infographic and view it in larger scale.

This infographic would be great to display on an interactive whiteboard or with an LCD projector and discuss with the class.

This site IS iPad-friendly and using multitouch gestures (e.g. pinch to zoom in and out) works really nicely on an infographic.