If you want to help your children with their spelling and aren't interested in fancy packaging or enticing gimmicks, this is the package for you. If you want to assist their spelling and vocabulary development in French - or even feel inclined to try your hand at adapting the program for any other language, so much the better. Let's Spell First 500 Words is a spelling package in which the child chooses a screen from a selection which accesses a familiar scene - for example the body, the kitchen or a rather tiny, overcrowded zoo - that's filled with recognisable objects.

You have to choose one of the objects which appears on the next screen and pick out the letters needed to spell it, in the order in which they should appear. If you get it right, you are congratulated and rewarded with a little tune, but if you get it wrong, your letters are shot down, the dragon breathes fire at you and you get the chance to try again after you have been shown how to spell the word correctly.

You can work in English or French - the French table includes all the accented letters and when they're being spelt you even hear a digitised French accent.

The main problem with this program is not knowing what it calls a particular object - it's very frustrating to spell something right and have all your letters shot down just because it's not what the programmers thought it should be called. There are also some problems with recognition - in the pet shop, for example, you might think you are looking at a fish tank but, you're not really, because according to the program, you are merely looking at fish. To overcome these difficulties, the programmers, Jayne and Richard Dunn, have incorporated an editing option for parents. You access it via a customisable password and then have the option to alter words that you think your child would be more likely to recognise - for example, depending on where you live may mean that you call sauce "ketchup" or vice versa.

There are seven detailed tutorials included in the manual explaining everything you can customise in the Editor. This includes setting the options, creating your own pictures to suit your own spelling requirements, altering the program for other European languages and even making new sound banks and memory requirements. This is a pretty good exercise as long as you don't mind being without the frills that come with many educational programs; when the individual items are picked out for you to spell, they end to be pixelated although still easily recognisable; there is a learning aspect if you make mistakes, as well as praise if you do well. The ability to edit Let's Spell First 500 Words for your own requirements makes this a very powerful program.