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: 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.
Customer Review: Works With Mac Classic Really Well
Summary: 5 Stars
I have an 2003 iBook 800, and this game has to play through Mac Classic but it doesn't crash as much as most games and mostly survives being in sleep mode and then waking up to play the game. The game automatically starts Classic mode and changes the screen size without input, so my daughter can start the game on her own.
My daughter is 4 and she loves this game. Albeit she finds it a little repetative because there is the same 5 games that need to be completed for each letter. She always wants to play it gets through two letters and then moves onto something else. It has really good movies for rewards every 5 letters or so that you complete. The sound and the songs are really excellent, and the visuals are pleasing and simple.
My daughters letter recognition has gotten better and she is really seeing the connection between sounds and letters from this game.
She is already disposed to learn to read and therefore she wants to play so that she can read. Other kids who need more entertainment to play a learn-to-read game might not be able to sit through this game. But the controls and navigation are really simple for children unlike most games.
Customer Review: Good - could be better
Summary: 3 Stars
I got this CD for my toddler because he LOVES the Reader Rabbit Playtime for Baby & Toddler! (Which I highly recommend!) The Reader Rabbit Learn to Read with Phonics, on the otherhand, is not nearly as good. The quality of the animation and the "fun-ness factor" are not there. It is more educational, but your child has got to want to use it, and mine just asks me to put in the other Reader Rabbit. Customer Review: My child learned to read!
Summary: 5 Stars
I highly recommend this CD series. My son started playing with it at the library when he was 3, and learned so fast that we bought the program for our home. After just a few months, he's sounding out words, reading street signs, and is very enthusiastic about learning. Mattie the rabbit and her friends are cute sweet creatures that captivate a child's attention, and their antics are funny enough to make adults laugh. My son likes the different accents used and the animation as well. An A+!Customer Review: The best reading and phonics game
Summary: 5 Stars
I own several phonics and reading games, and there's no doubt in my mind that the Reader Rabbit games are head and shoulders above the rest. The three main reading games: Learn to Read with Phonics, I Can Read With Phonics (also called Reading 6-9) and Reading 4-6 are absolutely a must for kids learning to read. No matter who the child is, if there's the ability to read in him/her, these games will get it out!Learn to Read with Phonics is fantastic in that it such an incredible amount of stuff to do. Every letter has a land, and the child explores each land by going through phonics drills and reading two books. The books and the drills are divided into 5 levels, and each land requires finishing some phonics practice before the child can move on to the next. Alternatively, the parents can also elect to go to each land or each activity if they choose, so there is great flexibility here. Every word in the books is individually clickable, so the child can be certain to learn how to say each word. The drills are not particularly demanding, so even if the child doesn't know much, as long as he goes through the drills he can move on to the next level. He is not stuck there until he gets it all right, but even this can be adjusted by the parent.
Learn to Read with Phonics is a game, but not in the normal sense. There's phonics drilling here, meaning that this is actually glorified homework. If you just let your child do it on his own, he will do it for a while, like my 5 year old son did, but he will probably get tired of it after a few hours and will not go through the entire journey. (Girls are probably better at this than boys.) I got the games to homeschool my kid. I require that he finishes 5 letterland a day, and I make sure that reads out each letter in the books by individually clicking on them. This takes him an hour (longer when he gets to the end of the journey when the levels get harder and the books get longer.) When he's done, I let him have a small bag of chips. He seems to find the deal acceptable. When he is all the way through, I make him start from the beginning again.
Repetition isn't necessarily fun, but that's how people learn. I find the computer invaluable at teaching little kids. At their stage, there's more repetition than anything else, and as a formal college teacher, I don't look forward to teaching little kids stuff to my kids. The computer is perfect for the job because it never gets bored, tired, impatient, or a sore throat from saying "See Jane run" too many times.
The difference between Learn to Read with Phonics and I Can Read with Phonics is their levels: one is for ages 4-6, and the other one is for 6-9, but the age group is really arbitrary. If your child has trouble reading, he/she can benefit from both CDs. They are two totally different games, and together with Reader Rabbit Reading 4-6, which is still a different reading game, makes a perfect package as a computer reading teacher.
I highly recommend this product to anyone.
Note: another reviewer here says that this game may not run on XP. Not true. I have XP and all three Reader Rabbit reading games run just fine on it.