Jumpstart Preschool

I heard some good reviews on JumpStart series, so I bought it for Anna as a Christmas present. It was an impulse purchase – I happened to be in Best Buy, and this box was on sale for $20. I have to admit that I was quite disappointed with this software, especially after all the big promises it made. The first disk of basic learning was so boring that I never even showed it to Anna. We played the second game in these series (Preschool Fundamentals) a couple of times. The idea of the game that you can get a pet in the beginning of the game, then go to several different places in the classroom, enter games and collect pet rewards. Then you can return to the pet’s playing area and watch your pet enjoy its reward. Once three rewards are collected, you can fly on a balloon and find your pet a new home in an exotic location (London, China, etc.). Anna really didn’t like the concept of dropping her kitty somewhere and then having to start from scratch with a different pet. Games themselves are extremely uneven. The counting and letters were very easy and boring for my child who was at that time 26 months. The music place and rhyming place were way over her head. The drawing place has severe bugs once you try to apply patterns to your creations. The game also crashes way too often. I felt that the game is too mouse-driven as well. Anna cannot use the mouse yet, so she just points me where to click. The only thing that we both liked in this games were little songs that are played on the recorder in the pet playing place. As you get more rewards, you get access to more songs. But just this one feature really is not worth investment in this package. If someone wants to share their reasons for liking this game, I am all ears

Teaching alphabet using the Web – Starfall

I have already set Starfall as one of my favorite links, but I cannot rave about it enough. I think that its creators did a great job teaching phonics in an easy and engaging way. We were not allowing Anna to watch TV, when she was an infant (a subject for another post), but I started sitting her on my lap and showing her letters in ABC portion of Starfall, since she was about 6 months old. Learning letters is not as easy as it appears. Apparently, research shows that letters are not remembered as a holistic shape, but rather by the spatial relationships of the curved and straight line. I noticed that in the beginning she was constantly mixing m and w as well as lowercase p and b. One letter that is still somewhat of a challenge for her is g- probably because it’s so close to number 9. I can see how confusing English letters can be for someone who is just starting to recognize those squiggles on the page. However, I do credit the time spent on Starfall and reading all those alphabet books to her early alphabet knowledge. At the age of 2 she was recognizing all the letters in any font and distinguishing between capital and lowercase.