Friday, 11 September 2009
Scholastic Brain Play
Title: Brain play. Preschool-1st grade
Author: Scholastic Inc.
Publisher: New York: Scholastic Inc.,
Date published: 2005.
Edition/Format: Computer file : CD for computer
Language: English
Place of Purchase: Watt's New
Liguanea
160 Old Hope Road
Kingston 6
Tel: (876) 970-0192 / 4664
Fax: (876) 977-3886
Website: http://www.wattsnewja.com/pub/
Audience: I believe this product is suitable for children 3 years and older.
Summary of Product Features
Dragon Tales builds math skills by helping young dragons earn their badges with early math concepts. Covers counting, number recognition, addition, spatial relationships, shapes & sizes.
Clifford Phonics develops important learning skills as you join Clifford and friends at the Birdwell Island Carnival! Teaches letter & sound recognition, word families, sight words, spelling and sentence structure.
I Spy Junior helps children practice thinking skills while playing unique riddles, puzzles and games. Covers problem solving, visual discrimination, memory, cause and effect, classification & sorting.
Disney's Adventures In Typing with Timon and Pumbaa features 15 fun-filled lessons that improve keyboard accuracy and typing speed. Teaches finger placement, home row technique, letter recognition, accuracy and speed.
Problems:
Dragon Tales: Use of Dragons to teach maths. The authors make Dragons look friendly. The symbolical use of the dragon in the Bible is not one that can justify our acceptance of this creature to teach our children.
Clifford Phonics: There is the mention of going to a Carnival. Though when we checked it out, the CD-ROM does not contain a carnival as we know it, but more an amusement park. Not sure if we want our children confuse with the terms. Carnival is not a positive term any at all, especially in Caribbean context or culture.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
After assessing the Phonics CD-ROM of the Scholastic Brain Play, I have a recommendation as to how it may be improved. I realised that even though there were excellent challenging games for children to play in order to build their phonemic awareness, there were frequent distractors from the learning experience.
With each game that is played there is an opportunity to win a prize which can be used to decorate the float. Characters in the game gave frequent reminders to the child to go to the "Big Stripe Tent" to decorate the Float for the parade. Therefore, a child who is unsupervised by a teacher or parent throughout the game may become satisfied with playing a few of the easier games and then spending a majority of the time decorating the float when he/she could be learning more about PHONICS. Hence, a parent may think that the child is learning while playing the game, when the child in actuality is decorating the float rather than learning and advancing to the more difficult levels.
I believe that should a child be unsupervised when using the program, he or she should be motivated to go the most challenging levels of the game in order to receive the various items needed to decorate the float. Let the decoration of the float be a reward for completing the most challenging stages of the game.
Post a Comment