Unlike many educational offerings we see nowadays, this package provides a real and extended range of options which can be used for children either as they develop skills or at a range of attainment levels.

The program is for the children at the early and intermediate stages of learning to read and is meant to help in two main areas. It encourages the use of contextual cues when reading, by always offering a word to be fitted into position in a sentence already on screen; this is a very good and helpful method to adopt. It also encourages phonics, as the program will split up the words into their constituent phonemes for your child to sound out.

It needs to be emphasised however that this will only be of help to your child if this matches the method used in its school and should not be used without consultation.

The best feature is the placement program, or test, which should be used before using the others and will advise you on which of the seven main programs to use and even which of the levels to try. A little visual encouragement would have been nice though.

D.C.