Does Bloom sometimes highlight words incorrectly? I’ve found some words highlighted in our stories that were not in the sample word list but used allowed letters, characters or sounds for that decodable stage.
Not that we know of! If you are seeing words that seem to be incorrectly highlighted, would you please run Bloom, open the book at the page that has the problem, and then use Help/Report a problem? If you leave the boxes checked to send us the book and a screen shot it will help us very much to figure out what is wrong and fix it.
Hi Lisa–I can also look at this with you by Skype if you’d like. Let me know.
I think Bloom is a great tool but sadly I am not able to use it to develop decodable readers. I believe this is because of the nature of the orthography of the language I am working with and the fact that the Bloom program does not take into account syllable boundaries (I had the same problem when I first started using PrimerPro many years ago).
The problem occurs where nasalised vowels are represented orthographically as a vowel character followed by “n” (e.g. “an, en, in”, etc.) I have included these letter combinations in the Decodable Reader Tool and added them to be introduced at one of the later stages. Stage 1 permits the letters “i, n, a” (and others) but if the user tries to type the word “ina” (V.CV) this is highlighted as incorrect because the program recognises the first two characters (“in”) as a single letter (CV - nasalised vowel) which is only permitted at a later stage.