Fun-Time Phonics- Review

Olivia has been a budding reader from quite early on. She enjoys working on learning phonics in a variety of methods. Recently, she had the chance to try out Fun-Time Phonics!™ Software - 2-PCs Win Download from The Critical Thinking Co.™.  This is a software download for Windows which means you don't need the internet to use the program. Fun-Time Phonics is part of the "Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic Before Kindergarten!™" bundle which offers several downloadable programs to help prepare your pre-K student for Kindergarten. You can also download these programs as apps in iTunes and Google Play.

Fun-Time Phonics is geared towards a beginning reader (or a child that can read but needs some practice), roughly age pre-K through 2nd grade. The download was very quick and the program was easy to use from the start. All I had to do was set up my child's name. You can use this with more than one student as they can each get their own account.

This program has 126 lessons that start out introducing beginning sounds, ending sounds, then listening for rhyming sounds. Each lesson starts out with a robot introducing what sound the child needs to listen for along with showing them colorful pictures of the words. The next screen then has the child picking out a picture that goes along with the sound that the robot wants them to find. Once they click on the correct picture, they hear an applause and another robot repeats that that photo has the same sound as the previous picture sound they wanted you to match. The robot says the name of each picture one time but if the child needs to hear the word again, there is a "sound symbol" under each photo that they can click on to hear the word read again. If the child doesn't get a high enough passing percentage, the program has them repeat that lesson again. Likewise if you as a parent want your child to repeat a lesson, you simply go to the admin page and go to the lesson or sound you want them to do again.

The admin page shows what percentage the child got on each sound. This is also the place where you can change between the users. One thing to note about the admin page is that you can reset the scores on your child's account. After taking the above screen shot, somehow I clicked on it and it erased all the work my daughter did. I never was given a second box to click "are you sure", so that would be a suggestion I would make. Make it harder to accidentally erase. Overall, Olivia has enjoyed the lessons though they do get repetitive. I've learned to just sit with her and click the green arrow to advance quicker to the next page when it's obvious she already knows the sound. I can see though how the simple repetition would be good for a student just starting out. Connect with The Critical Thinking Co.™: Facebook Google+ Pinterest