Designed to be used on a computer or whiteboard with key stage 1 children, this CD-Rom consists of four basic matching games with the aim of assessing children’s abilities to hear and discriminate everyday sounds at normal volume.

Each game has seven categories. However, the Speed Game and Picture Game do not involve sounds, being simple categorisation and wordpicture matching activities. The Sound Game and Name Game rely on the children being able to discriminate sounds to complete them, and this was not always easy for young children to do. I found asking them to discriminate between some of the sounds, for example, seven different alarms including a smoke alarm, a car alarm and a burglar alarm rather ambitious.

The pictures are clear and colourful and the games are easy to operate.

Many mainstream teachers would welcome activities which give some indication of a child’s hearing status and auditory discrimination skills.

However, this CD-Rom needs a wider range of sounds that can be more easily discriminated between.

Sandy Goler

Advisory Teacher of the Deaf, Kirklees service for children with sensory impairment