Reader Rabbit Learn to Read With Phonics
by The Learning Company
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List Price: Our Price: $6.99 You Save: $13.00 (65%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Software See more product details and other editions |
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Software Reviews of Reader Rabbit Learn to Read With Phonics
Customer Review: Great kids program!
Summary: 5 Stars
My 5-year old had some initial problems learning this, as some of the stuff is rather unintuitive. You have to pick up letters, identify words, do some drag-and-dropping (which is not always easy for small hands handling a computer mouse) but once the steep learning curve is over, it's a wealth for any kid learning to read and write! Highly recommended!Customer Review: A 4yr old learns to read with phonics
Summary: 4 Stars
Thank you for such a useful, motivating little guide into learning how to read. My grand daughter is having fun too.Customer Review: Good product, but no support and some technical issues
Summary: 4 Stars
My 4-year-old son likes this software quite a bit and has learned a solid amount from it. Many of the activities are well conceived, fun, and motivating. However, quite a few of them are weak in that random clicking works just as well as making thoughtful responses. I've had to remind my son to think about his answers before clicking, and this has worked to help reinforce the learning. All in all, with guidance I think this software does a tremendous amount of good. It helps especially with word recognition and phonics.
The game runs on Windows XP, but there is a bug with the piano word-completion game. Your child is shown some simple pictures that represent three-letter words. Below the word are three boxes representing the letters of the word. What is supposed to happen is that you're given the second and third letters; you then complete the word by dragging the missing first letter from a row of letters given lower on the screen to the empty box respresenting the first letter of the word. However, the second and third letters of the words are either blank or simply incorrect. "Hat" for example is supposed to have a blank, then an "a" and a "t". Intead it might have two blanks followed by an "l". This can be confusing, especially when your child is trying to sound out words. Still, with guidance your child will get through this, and it's only one of several activities on the disk.
Although the CD says that the game will work on Mac OSX, when I tried to run the program under OSX 10.4 (Tiger), the launcher tried to boot OS9 in order to run the main program. Saying that the program runs under OSX is misleading and incorrect. Mac users beware.
Support for the game is non-existent, as far as I can tell. I downloaded a patch to try and fix the buggy piano game, but that simply stopped the program from loading altogether and necessitated a reinstall from scratch. Somewhat of a pain since my son was halfway through his "road to reading" adventure, and had to start again.
Still, problems withstanding, this has been one of our best software purchases for our son. We've easily spent a productive 10 hours with it, and I'd say there are at least another 20+ good hours of learning left for my son to do. Just try to get it from some place that will let you return it if it doesn't work to your satisfaction.
Customer Review: Great investment for your child
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this software. My daughter loved this CD-ROM between the age of 4-6 before she went to school and now my son really likes it and it's great for him because he has problems pronouncing words. He enjoyed playing with it so much, that now he is able to match words with pictures and sound out several words.
The Reader Rabbit Toddler software has not yet been outgrown. To get the most out of it, your child should have the ability to hold and click a mouse, and should already have basic recognition of capital and lower-case letters. The lowest level is perfect for my child but would have been too difficult at ages 3 - 3 1/2. The software teaches both letter and word recognition as well as phonics. The games are cute and when your child gets tired of learning to read there are fun songs and graphics to listen to with "reading propaganda" lyrics about how fun and important it is to learn to read.
This is an excellent early reading CD-ROM. Buy it here, since most stores only stock games and the more lackluster "educational" programs.
Customer Review: Awful! Did anyone test this before shipping???
Summary: 2 Stars
Okay, it works. That's the good news. The program does what it was programmed to do. Otherwise is is awful.
Our four year old has been using the program for about a week now and we hate it. She enjoys the stories and the general layout of the game but has a very hard time with the actual tasks. I sat with her and tried to help only to find that I had a hard time with it as well.
In every "letter world" there are a list of things you have to complete. First you click on four things in the picture that start with the letter you are looking for. Then you go into the cart with the hamsters.
In the hamster cart you have three tasks. The first is to correctly identify the word that the hamster says from three possibles. The problem is that the hamster is very hard to understand as he sounds like a hamster rather than a well articulated person trying to teach a small child.
The next section is a fill in the blank area. There are three pictures of three letter words (cat, bus, etc.). Under the words are three blanks. Some of these blanks are filled in but not with letters that belong in the word!!! Sometimes there are X's in the spaces, sometimes random other letters and sometimes they are all blank. Then, with NO OTHER INSTRUCTION WHAT SO EVER, you are given 5 letters and expected to fill them in. The problem is that you are expected to fill in only the first, last or middle letter and they don't tell you which they are looking for. I can do this game. I know how to read and how to spell small words like bus. My daughter is learning to read and doesn't understand when looking at the words "dog, gum and bus" that the computer is looking for her to fill in the last letter just based on the available choices. She starts sounding out the word dog and wonders why there isn't a "d" in the pile to choose from.
When you leave the hamsters you go to the book section where the computer reads you a small story. This is fine except that on some of the pages the computer won't let you go to the next page until you click on something in the picture. But it doesn't tell you what it wants you to click on. My daughter's answer to this has been to randomly click all over the picture so that she can hear the rest of the story. It works but I hardly think it's teaching her anything at that point.
I think this is a worthless program that has confused her much more than it has helped. It seems as though the people writing it forgot that the target audience doesn't know how to read. When you are trying to teach someone who doesn't know how to read you need to speak clearly and slowly. You need to be consistent and you need to tell them what they need to do. This program is hard to understand, counter-intuitive and wildly inconsistent. It is not worth buying.