A clever and effective program that uses the computer's audio capabilities to help beginning readers fine-tune their awareness of letter sounds. Filled with sounds, songs, and rhymes, Davidson's Kid Phonics provides a wealth of appealing opportunities to discover how sounds and letters knit themselves into words and sentences.
In the Sound Buster game, kids hear sound clues and click on different critters called Busters to find a matching sound. Challenges include identifying sounds, songs, rhyming words, words that will end a nursery rhyme, and more. (Try a couple yourself; they're not as easy as you may think!)
Every right answer reveals a bit of a hidden scene. When the whole scene appears, kids can choose a picture and build the word it represents, again by clicking different Busters to hear various phonetic possibilities and dragging the right pieces together. Once the word is correctly spelled, kids can easily build sentences around it (some silly, some sensible) by clicking on different verbs, objects and adjectives. Finally, they can color the picture and print the page for their personal word dictionary.
In the Word Builder, kids pick one of 200 pictures and again build the word it represents by finding and assembling the right sounds. Its "Show Me" button is a terrific, animated tutor that steps kids through the process of putting letters where they belong and then sounding them out, individually and in combination.
The bottom line: excellent use of multimedia to enliven the mechanics of reading. A good follow-up to Bailey's Book House, and a nice balance to Stories on Screen titles.
 | for Learning | Hands-on exploration of pre-reading concepts including letter, |
| sound and word recognition, spelling, rhyming, sentence structure | ||
| for Looks | Sounds and visuals enhance learning experience |
| for Longevity | Lots to do so kids keep coming back |
