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May 15, 2002
Readiness Tools for Tykes
By Roxanne Schneider and Charles Parham
Kids join Clifford, Pooh, and a host of other colorful characters for skill-building adventures in these six early learning programs.
Selecting software for young children demands extra care and a critical eye. Research has shown us that kids learn best when they can interact in the context of a real social and material world. Computers come close to simulating this world, and high-quality children's software creates uniquely interactive narrative environments that draw youngsters into rich imaginative settings where they can explore ideas and solve complex problems. Here, we look at some of the best "all-around" programs that deliver creative critical thinking activities and give pre-K-2 kids' readiness skills a workout.
Tivola's Millie Meter and Her Adventures in the Oak Tree and Humongous Entertainment's Freddi Fish 5: The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove both stress exploration and discovery in a complex yet creative setting. Youngsters won't realize they're making inferences to find objects, since these programs ask them to solve problems within story contexts. Other titles reviewed here provide captivating backdrops for practicing specific readiness skills, particularly for kids who need that extra help. Reader Rabbit, Clifford, Winnie the Pooh, and the JumpStart series all target and monitor progress in specific skill areas. While children will find these titles delightfully entertaining, teachers will appreciate the challenging opportunities they offer for independent exploration and skill development.
Clifford Learning Activities (Scholastic)
The big red dog and his neighborhood friends, T-Bone, Cleo, and Mac, are involved in another exciting adventure from Scholastic. Prize Pooch Magazine is looking for the best dogs in the country, and these four canine buddies rise to the challenge by doing good deeds in their Birdwell Island neighborhood. Kids lead these friendly mutts from one island hangout to another by successfully completing skill-building tasks.
Nine activities offer a variety of challenges for youngsters, such as sorting cans, bottles, and cartons at the junkyard; counting fruit as it falls from a tree; or recognizing cloud patterns by matching shapes that rhyme (e.g., cat, hat; fish, dish, etc.). Art activities combine with language arts when kids select one of the dogs, an action verb, and a prepositional phrase from separate lists to create a poster drawing. Early learners will enjoy filling the drawing with colors or patterns, and adding sticker shapes, such as hats or glasses, to the dogs in the poster. They can then click on screen objects to add the rhythms of reggae, hip-hop, country, or disco for a fun music activity.
Clifford offers three levels of difficulty for most activities, so children can explore more advanced tasks, such as the sorting game that increases the learning curve by asking kids to sort foods, articles of clothing, or containers with patterns. Once an activity is complete, the dogs have their photo taken for their scrapbook. When it's filled with photos, the scrapbook gets sent to Prize Pooch Magazine. Kids will love the cheerful and encouraging voices, the colorful graphics, and the ease of navigation, while teachers will appreciate the program's learner-directed instruction.
JumpStart Languages (Knowledge Adventure)
JumpStart Languages introduces kids to different cultures and languages at the JumpStart World's Fair, where they can visit four international pavilions: America, Mexico, France, and Japan. Each is filled with playful activities that introduce and reinforce vocabulary words in different languages. Players receive pieces of the globe when they demonstrate their working knowledge of foods, numbers, colors, clothes, songs, and stories in different languages. Once they've acquired all four pieces, short videos reward them with brief glimpses of a national holiday, a popular sport, clothing, transportation, or another cultural impression from one of the four countries.
The program offers a variety of vocabulary activities, such as a game of hide-and-seek for country flags hidden under objects in a kitchen. As players search and click, the program pronounces the name of the object in the language of the pavilion they've chosen. Kids learn what to call items of clothing when they dress a puppet with a variety of hats, shirts, pants, and shoes. A storybook activity asks users to select a fairy tale, as well as some of the vocabulary words that will be included in the narrative, by clicking on the picture of the word they want in the story. For example, Little Red Riding Hood may bring either a pie, cake, or candy to her grandmother's house. The student selects an option and then hears that chosen word translated in the context of the story. Unfortunately, this is the only activity in which words are translated from English to a foreign language, which limits the program's value as a language-teaching tool. Kids will, however, gain a good sense of the sound of different languages.
JumpStart Languages' most valuable component is its helpful introduction to different cultures. Each pavilion, for example, includes a boom box that plays folk songs, a picture frame that introduces famous paintings from different countries, and a speaking clock. Kids can print traditional holiday decorations, architectural landmarks, and costumes, as well as recipes and children's games to help set the stage for a cultural festival.
Freddi Fish 5: The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove (Infogrames, Inc.)
The Case of the Creature of Coral Cove is another in Humongous' long line of intuitively designed software that encourages young children to explore and solve problems at their own pace. While they may not be practicing specific math facts or phonics skills, kids nevertheless learn how to become insightful and resourceful thinkers as they complete the challenges in this latest episode of Freddi Fish.
Coral Cove Park has been closed due to sea monster sightings. With the permission of Mayor Marlin, Freddi and her sidekick Luther start out to investigate the mysterious sea monster that has been terrorizing the cove. In the process of inquiry, they meet many different fish-such as Donna, the claw machine repair fish-who need a particular item to finish their work fixing park rides. Many of the characters they encounter also have something someone else in Coral Cove needs. Freddi and Luther must make trades to unlock doors, fix equipment, and finally uncover the mystery. The program leaves clever clues, so players must return to specific characters in the game for help. Kids use map skills, encounter logical predicaments, and explore creative solutions to find the sea monster. Soothing background tunes and amusing animated characters keep them company throughout the many areas of Coral Cove, while coral, fish, and plants come alive with every click. An ambitious player may complete the entire game in a few hours, but most kids will take several days or weeks to work through challenges.
Reader Rabbit Preschool and Kindergarten (Riverdeep/The Learning Company)
These two independent programs come packaged together in one robust school edition. Both programs follow a similar format: Reader Rabbit and his pal Sam visit a new land where they discover a big problem that needs to be solved. To find the solution, kids must visit a variety of sites where they learn and practice a number of skills. For each task they complete successfully, they receive a token for their treasure chest. Once it's full, they're awarded a key that leads them to a final destination.
The preschool program Sparkle Star Rescue is a fantasy story about disappearing stars and a flying galleon full of Pi-rats who've crashed atop Mount Brill volcano, trapping all the stars inside. Youngsters work on letter matching as well as shape and color identification to help Reader and Sam find a set of jewellike Brillites to release the captured stars. Children will especially like the Sparkle Rocket math section, as it challenges them to load the right number of squeaky, tumbling little astronauts (sparklenauts) onto a rocket ship. Unfortunately, the final activity at Mount Brill is somewhat anticlimactic and unrelated to other program activities, as kids assemble cards with dance steps (twirls, hops, etc.) into a sequence, and Reader Rabbit and Sam dance the pattern.
Bounce Down in Balloon Town for kindergarten students is significantly more challenging and requires much more time to complete than Reader Rabbit for preschoolers. In this adventure, Reader and Sam's space ship has been captured by bubble wrap. To regain their ship the two friends have to explore Balloon Land, where they'll play enough games to build a set of musical instruments that will allow our heroes to enter Pointy Palace and free their ship. Once inside the palace, they must solve two final reading challenges-a storytelling activity and sentence completion tasks-both of which effectively put language activities in context, unlike some of the other phonics-based activities in the program.
Games involve a traditional set of kindergarten readiness activities: basic phonics, rhyming vowel sounds, matching word-picture games, and pattern activities. As with the preschool program, kids will especially like the math activity. Young learners must add and subtract numbers to balance the wings of a plane, offering a wonderful visual picture of the idea of equality. Most activities are engaging, though some seemed to require more skills practice than necessary, with an average of 12 run-throughs needed to move on to the next challenge.
Millie Meter and Her Adventures in the Oak Tree (Tivola)
This unique program combines rich science content with challenging interactivity. Millie must save an ancient oak tree from a chainsaw-wielding homeowner who wants to extend his lawn. He agrees to spare the tree if she can provide him with ten pieces of evidence that the tree harbors life. Kids help her find the evidence by accompanying Millie and her camera on a Magic School Bus-style journey through the tree. The program offers clues for when kids should take a picture, but it takes some real persistence for kids to collect all ten pictures needed to finish the game-and let the tree live.
Young learners visit eight tree zones to take photos of organisms dependent upon the tree for life. They gather information about its different layers, how the root system collects nutrients, how the tree combats harmful animals and interacts with beneficial ones, and much more. Animals animate the lively world inside: ants milk aphids, squirrels hide from martins, and woodpeckers complain about nuthatches beating them to tasty beetles. Meanwhile, kids can click on helpful pull-down charts and diagrams of the parts of the tree, habitat zones, and root structure.
A mix of arcade-style games and quiz-based activities reinforce concepts and lessons learned. For example, in "Who lives there?" kids must find the right tree zone for selected animals. There's also a true-false quiz on tree ecology. Complex language, the narrator's British accent, and the fast pace of conversation, however, mean some kids might miss a number of important concepts, making this a potentially better program for more advanced students.
Winnie the Pooh Kindergarten (Disney Interactive)
In addition to its solid battery of kindergarten readiness skills, this program's soft music and calming graphics create a gentle charm that will appeal to teachers. Children may select from seven activities, including counting, early reading skills, shape sorting, scenery exploration, and more.
Familiar characters introduce early learners to critical skills, such as Roo's Number Balloons that lets kids count, add, and subtract up to 20 balloons-and then pop them with a dart at the end of each problem. In Owl's Word Shop, students must help Owl make an alphabet book by dragging pictures and the first letter of the words that name them onto the page. At more advanced levels, children must search for the correct word to label the picture in the book. Pooh's Thoughtful Spot lets young Zen masters build a beautiful scene by selecting a landscape, a sky background, and objects from the natural world, which can be changed to reflect different seasons.
Owl's Memory Challenge introduces simple Spanish vocabulary (colors, numbers, seasons, animals, and simple objects) with a concentration-type matching game that pairs English and Spanish word cards. At its most challenging level, students must match the Spanish word to its English translation simply by hearing the Spanish word spoken out loud. Accompanying the wide range of basic skill games offered here are printable bookmarks, name tags, alphabet flash cards, and 18 worksheets that deal with sorting, comparison, simple math, crossword puzzles and more.
Roxanne Schneider is a school technology consultant for Sun Associates in Amherst, Mass. Charles Parham is curriculum coordinator at Smith College Campus School in Northampton, Mass.
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