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| Reggie |
My daughter has now been at school for a whole term, where has the time gone? She's really enjoying learning to read; she tries to read everything from cereal packets to bus stops. So it was perfect timing when I was approached by Reading Eggs to review their online reading games.
Upon first entering the site my daughter was taken through a test to determine what level her reading skills were already at, the questions were spoken very clearly and she had no problem moving the cursor to the correct answer (or incorrect answer when she didn't know).
Once her reading level was established we then entered into a wide range of games. The children follow a path along a map, earning eggs for playing games, as well as moving them into harder sections of the map as they learn.
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| Following the map |
In the games where the picture was static and only required a click, she had no problem moving the cursor around to select answers, join the dots or whatever that particular puzzle required, but she struggled with moving images or clicking and dragging. There was one game where she had to catch balloons with lower case letters on them and drag them to their matching uppercase letter. I have to say even I struggled to do this with the laptop mouse, she did find it easier once I scrabbled around to find our standalone mouse. If you want it to work on an iPad, which is such a good interface for young children and makes this much easier you need to download a free app called "Rover" and open Reading Eggs via this. This gets round the problem of iPads not running flash.
Outside of the main game there are plenty of things to visit. There is a shop where you can 'spend' your eggs to buy things for the avatar's house, or buy the avatar a new hat or even funny legs! Your can personalise your avatar, watch short nursery rhyme animations and play driving games.
At first I had to sit with her to guide her through the site - telling her to click 'next' when we'd finished a game, but slowly she is getting the hang of navigating a site for herself (which isn't something she's ever done before). So not only is this helping her with her reading, its also a great site for improving IT skills. I'm not going to leave her unsupervised on the internet, but I can at least do the ironing* whilst she's playing.
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| The playroom |
If you would like a 5 week extended free trial for your children then go to Reading Eggs, register and then when you add a child you will see a promo code box where you can enter this code UKB24MBT
*yeah, right like I do any ironing!
Disclaimer: Reading Eggs have kindly given my daughter a 3 month free for the purposes of this review
