Fisher-Price Ready for School - Reading
© 1998 Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
The Little People characters and seven activities await your preschooler in this engaging program that effectively introduces and reinforces early reading skills. After signing in, grown-ups can set the game to require mouse skills or to a "press any key for success" mode (still requiring occasional clicks). Adults can also select a freeplay or board game mode. When playing with the board game, children are first assigned four letters they'll be learning. Each time they play the game they learn four new letters. Next, they are prompted to turn over cards to see which color spot on the board they should move to. Many spots offer something to do, with games involving matching letters, identifying rhyming words, matching pictures to words and decorating letters. The activities are very simple and have only one level. As children play the games and advance around the board, they earn letters. As they accumulate letters, they can explore the alphabet via an onscreen keyboard-like activity, complete with four fun renditions of the alphabet song. The last activity on the game board asks kids to choose elements of a simple story. The program takes their choices and integrates them into an animated storybook that can be read aloud onscreen or printed out. To more computer-savvy children, the repetitive format can get a bit boring, but the majority of our testers liked the program. It's really ideal for three and four year olds just learning their letters. Adding levels to the activities would have increased the CD's playing life. We did, however, appreciate the Family Resource Center that accompanies the program, offering parenting tips and printable activities.
$20, Win 95, Win 3.1, Mac OS (CD-ROM)
Teaches: reading readiness