French Software Reviewed
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Software
Title: Sitting on the Farm |
| Publisher
: |
Focus |
| Age
Group : |
4
- 9 |
| Curriculum
Area : |
Language
Development |
| Year
of Publication : |
1997 |
| Mac,
PC or other : |
PC |
A
nice story with bright illustrations and plenty of repetition.
Could be used by individuals or small groups.
| Overview of
Teaching with this Title |
N.B.
This program was used in a 2nd standard
class, as an English language development program.
The French version was not used.
Suitable for work on reading / written skills.Special
needs pupils were encouraged to progress because of the amount of repetition.
They can also listen along if they are unable to read.
The program is suitable for viewing by small groups of children.
The text is too small for larger groups to view.
This program is more child friendly than using a book and accompanying
cassette. The children feel
more in control as they can adjust the pace if they wish to.
The “Write-along” part is a little disappointing as the child
has a lot of work to do. Filling in the blanks is slow and no help is
offered with spellings. When
the child prints out their work they do not get the colourful picture
with the text.
Content is reliable, accurate and up-to-date.
Gender equity is prominent, the pupils can choose the sex of the narrating
voice for the story.
Language is age appropriate. There are, however, no varying levels of
difficulty.
The child may pause the story at any point, thus allowing good contol
of the program.
There is plenty of variety with "Listen-along", "Read-along",
"Sing-along" and "Write-along" modes.
Sitting on the Farm is a well designed program.
Pupils found it easy to navigate. The listen-along mode was particularly
colourful, as was the sing-along mode.
It was felt by the class teacher that the write-along mode left
a lot to be desired. The
2nd standard pupils found the lack of
a spelling list a big disadvantage. Too much was expected of the
pupils.
Perhaps
we were just unfortunate, but installation of this program was difficult
and frustrating. We tried
(unsuccessfully) installing it on three different machines.
Then for no apparent reason the program began to run correctly
on the original machine!
It was not an auto-run installation, but should have been
a lot easier to install than it was.
There was a simple insert in the cd-rom case. This was the only form of supporting documentation.
It was very basic, not of much use.
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