Usborne's Animated First Thousand Words
© 1997 Scholastic, Inc.
Based on the book, The Usborne First Thousand Words, this CD presents 1,000 vocabulary words in 35 scenes in categories such as kitchen, yard, street, toy store, pets and colors. Within each scene, kids have the same set of choices. For example, in the toy store you can click on a dog to see the word "DOG", hear "dog" read aloud, or perhaps record your own voice reading the word. You can also match objects, sounds or words to pictures from the scenes in three different activities, can collect objects from the scenes using a word list and find a hidden duck in many of the scenes. (We couldn't figure out the purpose of this one.) While the idea of the program is excellent, the design, graphics and animations are crude relative to other programs, such as DK's My First Incredible, Amazing Words and Pictures. In the word games, children weren't sure if their answers were correct when they tried to match words to objects. A clown was there to provide feedback, but his responses weren't clear. The best game was a word finding game, where you race the clock to click on a particular object. To make things easier, each word can be repeated by clicking on a picture at the bottom of the screen. The English/Spanish toggle button is nice for exposing kids to another language. Also handy is the ability to easily save and print the pictures and scenes. This is an easy-to-use program that might be useful in some classroom settings, but the activities could benefit from some zip to liven things up.
$19.95, Win 95, Win 3.1, Mac OS (CD-ROM)
Teaches: vocabulary (in English or Spanish), early reading, sight words