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September 15, 2002

Ready, Set, Read!

By Iris Obille Lafferty, Ed.D.

Put reading first this fall with six titles that deliver interactive literacy lessons for the K-3 crowd.

Leaving no child behind means making sure all kids can read by the end of the third grade, so the time is right for programs that incorporate what reading research has discovered about the best ways to successfully teach literacy skills. We've selected six offerings-from full-featured online curricula to "smart toys" that target a specific skill-to represent the variety of literacy tools available for the classroom. All dutifully focus on one or all of the five key skills that are central to reading achievement: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Most offer standards-based curriculum in imaginative variations of the talking book, while each blends multiple learning modalities-sight, sound, and touch-into a tangible language learning experience.

We've organized our review to begin with titles that target the broadest range of reading skills and conclude with those that focus on a particular literacy-building activity. Lightspan's comprehensive Early Reading Program tackles the essential reading skills listed by the National Reading Panel, including phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension. Soliloquy's Reading Assistant and LeapFrog's LeapPad are research-based tools that let kids practice reading fluency and phonemics using electronic books. Crick's Clicker 4 creativity and writing tool allows youngsters to create their own talking books. Finally, Compass Learning's PlayBox Theme Time and the GeoSafari Phonics Lab engage preschoolers with entertaining activities that teach the ABCs. All blend seamlessly into the language arts curriculum, and students will find themselves enthralled by the sights, sounds, and stories in these enjoyable activities.

Early Reading Program (Lightspan)

Early readers can get started on Lightspan's Early Reading Program by selecting from an inviting array of them- and skills-based activities, from spelling and vocabulary games to phonics and decoding practce.

The Early Reading Program, designed with the National Reading Panel's guidelines for K-3 student achievement in mind and created specifically to meet the Reading First initiative, delivers comprehensive, interactive online literacy-building tools.

Intelligently organized using the "assess, align, instruct, and evaluate" model, the program's audio-supported pre- and posttests allow teachers to accurately measure and align their teaching plans to meet students' academic needs.

Once pretesting is complete, learners needing extra help with phonics and decoding, reading comprehension, or vocabulary skills can move on to individualized skill-appropriate activities. For example, readers can begin with simple activities like ABCs of Gravity, a concentration-type game that asks them to find two matching upper- and lowercase letters hidden behind curtained windows. Fluent readers tackle more advanced comprehension tasks by reading from a variety of books, such as The Search for Mother Cat, and then answering questions. Reading selections are geared toward mastering reading skills at one of four reading levels-early, emergent, transitional, or fluent.

Students select additional activities through the site's Imagination Academy, a program home page populated by 15 school buildings labeled by activity names such as Tail-Wagging Tunes or Paw Prints, from which a cheery host of animated canine characters lead students into word matching and rhyming activities. In Sound Collector, kids choose consonant digraphs to complete a given word. Each correct response reveals a new sound and uncovers a portion of a picture that, when completely uncovered, becomes a short movie.

More advanced activities include Crazy Currents, where kids help a character named Riff negotiate his kayak down a river. Riff happily advances through the angular maze of rapids each time a student correctly identifies the missing suffix for a given word in a sentence. An incorrect answer costs Riff an oar. Correct responses are randomly assigned points that correspond to how many waves Riff can travel.

While the program covers major reading benchmarks for early learners in great depth, the curriculum is not recursive, and teachers will have to find ways to review acquired knowledge and draw connections to new lessons in a meaningful way. However, teachers will welcome the program's comprehensive online support resources, as well as field-based reading consultants who perform needs assessments and on-site training.

Reading Assistant (Soliloquy Learning)

Soliloquy's Reading Assistant acts as an electronic tutor using speech-recognition technology and a microphone headset to assist readers with word recognition and reading comprehension.

Designed for use in grades 2-5, Soliloquy's Reading Assistant comes with a built-in speech recognition engine and a microphone headset for reading electronic books aloud. The program acts like a tutor to help students advance their reading skills, especially in the areas of vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension.

Students enter the program through an image of a cozy library setting, complete with an overstuffed armchair. From there, they select from a variety of age-appropriate topics (e.g., poetry, animals, everyday life), and then choose from among 19 titles in the library, ranging from lighthearted pieces to witty European folktales to poems that have an element of the macabre. "Bedroom Monster," for example, is a silly poem about a boy who is sure that there is a monster lurking underneath his bed, but all he can find are traces of sweaty socks and a fuzzy meatball sandwich. Titles are interesting and age-appropriate, with detailed artwork, and are drawn from the Ladybug, Spider, or Click publications.

Students having difficulty deciding what to read can refer to story selection guides that indicate reading level, while the program keeps track of their progress in practice activities. Once they select a title, readers can opt to listen to the story or to begin reading and recording their own voice. As the student reads aloud into the headset microphone, correctly read words change from black to gray text.

If learners fail to say a word correctly, the Reading Assistant gently intervenes by providing proper pronunciation and then cueing them to repeat the word and continue reading. Throughout, kids can summon the picture dictionary with word definitions and pronunciations of challenging words.

Brain Busting multiple-choice quizzes follow each story and are designed to reinforce vocabulary and story comprehension. As a bonus, students receive Power Points when stories are re-read at a high rate of fluency. Teachers can listen in on students' recorded reading or view a progress report that itemizes indicators such as fluency data, reading grade level, and how well students are progressing toward their Power Points goals.

LeapPad (LeapFrog SchoolHouse)

The LeapPad's kid-size electronic platform takes reading offline with 26 illustrated sotrybooks that teach early readers how to decode sounds and recognize letters.

The LeapPad is a flat electronic platform about the size of a large picture book. Attached to its base is a laser-guided stylus young readers use to point at words in books. When kids point to words, the LeapPad reads them aloud so they can complete learning activities (e.g., select items from an illustration whose name has the "ar" sound), read entire texts, or hear individual words or phonemes. From there, the stylus can be used to change modes to hear, spell, and sound out large-print text. Students will also enjoy the colorful illustrations animated by music and sound, such as barking dogs and roaring buses.

Companion books teach students to decode sounds by understanding letter and sound relations. The First Grade edition includes 26 illustrated storybooks dedicated to understanding specific letters and sounds. For example, Leap's Big, Big Bag reviews the short a, i, and o vowel sounds together, and also integrates earlier lessons that focus on short vowel sounds individually. By the end of the year, the curriculum progresses to include initial and final consonant blends, long vowels, consonant digraphs, vowel digraphs, complex vowel pairs and diphthongs, and r-controlled vowels.

Concrete and easy to manipulate, the LeapPad storybooks are a feast for the auditory and visual senses. And while kids can endlessly explore and listen on their own, the LeapPad is also designed for use with LeapFrog SchoolHouse's Literacy Center, a comprehensive early reading curriculum that also includes the LeapDesk Learning System, LeapMat, and additional CDs with songs for promoting phonemic awareness. Used in tandem with the larger program or by itself, teachers can nestle this activity within a larger classroom reading program.

Clicker 4 (Crick)

Kids can compose sentences with Clicker 4 by selecting words, pictures, and even sounds from one of the program's theme-based grids

Clicker 4 is an innovative literacy program appropriate for pre-K through middle school students. Teachers can customize the program content and interface (both a switch interface and touch windows are available), making it an excellent tool for struggling readers and writers, as well as ESL and special needs students.

Clicker is comprised of two parts: Clicker Writer and Clicker Grids. The Clicker Writer is a child-friendly talking word processor that typically occupies the upper third of the screen. A student may enter text using the keyboard, or by clicking on words, pictures, or sounds from one of the Clicker grids-theme-based templates viewed in the bottom two-thirds of the screen. A right-click on a picture or word in the grid sends it to the Writer. A left-click lets the user listen to the word before electing to place it into the word processor.

Grids can be customized with "cells" of pictures, sounds, or words from Clicker's picture library and word banks. Alternatively, teachers may use their own digitized images, words, and recorded sounds to create infinite variations of subject-specific word banks, sentence building tasks, and multimedia projects. The grids and word processor let kids create endless sentence and story combinations.

In addition to extra grids, Clicker's Web site also offers free electronic talking books on age-appropriate topics. My School, for example, narrates details of school life, and young readers can flip through the pages at their own pace or click on the speaker icon to hear stories. Clicker's books are designed to promote fluency and word recognition. Compared to the other electronic books reviewed here, however, Clicker's talking book's voice is somewhat robotic and not its best feature.

While early readers will appreciate opportunities to independently explore Clicker as a reading and writing tool, pre-readers will benefit from using Clicker in a group setting or with an adult's assistance. For instance, one of the newest grids from the Clicker Web site is designed to teach early learners how to recognize words. Using this grid, students break down sentences from popular nursery rhymes into words and list them into a grid. Sentences can then be written and listened to in the Clicker Writer.

PlayBox Theme Time (CompassLearning)

Extension activities, such as the ABC train that only moves when letters of the alphabet are correctly put in order, follow PlaybBox Theme Time's colorful, theme-based electronic books.

PlayBox Theme Time delivers standards-based curriculum to both school and home with 52 thematic units that build upon popular topics for early learning, including Safety, Transportation, Weather, and Family. In the Transportation unit, for example, teachers begin with "Let's Go," an introductory story followed by six detailed classroom and at-home activities that range from racing ground vehicles to making a car-shaped snack.

Like most themes covered in the program, Transportation begins with a brightly illustrated reader, entitled What Has Wheels? On the screen, this electronic book is drawn three-dimensionally on top of a wooden book holder, and kids opt to read aloud or to have the program read to them. The Let Me Read option encourages students to flip freely back and forth through the book's eight pages to become familiar with the text or to merely enjoy the colorful graphics. Early learners will like the large, easy-to-select buttons and smaller font size that emphasizes graphics, listening skills, and story comprehension over tracking and phonics.

As with each unit, Transportation also comes with three online learning activities. For example, Paint Box, a fun, age-appropriate drawing and painting program, focuses on creative expression, and the ABC Train lets kids connect letters of the alphabet to make the train travel on its course.

GeoSafari Phonics Lab (Educational Insights)

Big bright buttons and a game-like interface playfully invite early readers to practice making three-letter words with GeoSafari Phonics Lab.

Pre-K through second-graders will enjoy learning their letters, sounds, and three-letter words while using the GeoSafari Phonics Lab. This electronic learning toy is user-friendly and compact-approximately half of the size of a computer keyboard. Raised letter keys form the alphabet that flashes during game play. Seven additional buttons line the left side of the keyboard, one for each of the interactive reading games available.

Beginning readers will hear music, sounds, and accolades as they sing the alphabet song or play one of the other games that follow a call-and-response pattern. For example, in Secret Word Maker, a voice instructs, "Can you guess the secret word? Press the letters j-o-g to make the secret word." As the student presses a letter, the letter's sounds are pronounced. Incorrect answers receive encouragement to try again, while the correct letters light up in the right order, to help the student decipher the answer. Correct responses herald a round of applause while the narrator says, "The letters j-o-g spell 'jog.'" Learners get three chances to respond with the correct answer.

The Phonics Lab is not intended as a comprehensive curriculum. Rather it supplements listening activities by helping students improve their letter recognition and phonemic awareness. Word-making exercises are helpful for understanding how sounds make words, but visual word recognition may be limited because the student cannot see the word, or see it used in any context.

Iris Obille Lafferty, Ed.D. is an educational consultant and researcher.

Editor's note: T&L's staff and editors evaluate only those products we can endorse for educational use. Web site reviews are based on content and tools that are available and accurate at the date of publication.

We'd like to thank Apple Computer and Gateway for loaning us the equipment to perform in-house evaluations.

For more on using technology in the reading classroom, see Susan McLester's issues-based inquiry into approaches to teaching core literacy skills in the October issue.

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