Earobics - What do you think of it?

Was interested to see what other people responded with, but since no one has yet - I thought I would let you know our experience. We used Earobics with my dd at age 5.5 -right after she was diagnosed with some severe auditory processing deficits from an SLP (had not had CAPD testing yet - but was later diagnosed with this by an audiologist a year later).

Most of the activities were very hard for her in the beginning. It was difficult to even get her to go do it. We then did sound therapy concurrently and she zipped thru all the exercises except still struggled with Karloon’s Balloons. (auditory short term memory/working memory is one of her biggest weaknesses) We then did Brainbuilder and in less than a month she zipped thru Karloon’s and completed all exercises. Her motivation to do the program increased dramatically - she knew she was having success and liked that feeling.

We did these therapies all over a 3-4mo. period. She went from not being able to remember ANY of her letter names (unless she sang in a song), sounds of letters, or names of numbers to knowing all of them and beginning to put the sounds together to form words. We feel it was due to a combination of the 3 therapies, but felt that Earobics was a critical piece. We subsequently purchased Step 2 - she had no difficulty with any of the exercises. But we never did complete the program - it’s something that we think about digging back out and re-doing.

Some SLP’s use Earobics in a clinical setting, so it must help some children. My bet is that children who enjoy doing it probably don’t need it. You may find that, once the novelty has worn off, the children who would most benefit from it won’t want to do it because they find it too hard.

My experience has been that computer programs can help a very few children with the specific needs addressed by the program. For other children, they are largely a waste of time. And the children with the specific needs typically are the ones least likely to enjoy working with the computer program, and need hand holding to get through it.

I think younger children would benefit the most, in general, and would also be the most likely to find the program amusing. So, I would guess it would be most suitable for the kindergarten children and least useful for the 3rd graders.

If it doesn’t cost too much, I’d say go ahead and get it. (I assume you would be buying a classroom version?) It probably beats a lot of busywork activities in terms of value.

My then-8yo daughter found Earobics very boring, but then she didn’t have auditory processing problems. She had trouble with reading because of visual processing and phonological issues.

Mary

My 8 year son has done Earobics both at school (as part of speech) and at home. He did what he liked and was good at in school. At home, I made him do the rest. It took one on one attention and some bribing to get him through it. This is the downside of a school setting—the kids who need it the most will resist the parts that are hard. OTH, I think it would be good developmentally for K. My four year old can do much of it and I think it helps develop skills.

I have Earobics in my family resource library for people with disabilities. Am very interested in auditory processing remedies. Recently, I’ve heard good things about Fast Forward, though it IS expensive. Can you give me address or other information on how to find out about the other two programs you mentioned that your daughter used?
Thank you.

Hi,
Our entire school district has purchased several copies of Earobics. We use it for any children scoring below a certain cut off score on the TOPA. Test of Phonological Awareness. We also use the LindaMoodBell Phonemic program
for all K-1-2 students. If you’d like more information, email me.

Brainbuilder 3.0 is a computer program, about $60 that specifically targets short term auditory and visual memory/sequential memory as measured by your digit span. It’s very boring, but we did see academic results from it - every time she jumped even half a digit (which is really half a year’s progress) - her academics, like reading would improve.

Info can be found at www.advancedbrain.com.

The sound therapy we did was Tomatis - similar programs include AIT, or Sonomas. ABT (advancedbrain) has a much less expensive home version out called The Listening Program - which we have done as well. We saw more gains with Tomatis, but use TLP as booster throughout the year.

I saw an interesting discovery when we were doing Brainbuilder (which we did for about 9mo., 15min. a day) and TLP. She would plataeu on a certain digit span for quite some time, we would do a round of TLP and immediately when she was finished with the TLP therapy, she would jump over the plateau. There’s a link there somehow?

Deanne,

My theory is that the TLP improved her auditory processing and so allowed information to be processed more efficiently. If it can’t be processed, it can’t be remembered.

My son improved his auditory memory from doing FFW to low normal but there were no exercises that seemed to work on auditory memory. The audiologist wanted us to do FFW for both memory and decoding problems.

Beth