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BrillKids’ Little Reader Version 3 – Better than Ever!

November 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

If you’ve been wondering about the dearth of new Little Reader flash cards being released, it’s because we’ve been busy beta testing the newest and latest version of BrillKid’s Little Reader - Version 3. If you already have Little Reader, you can go upgrade your copy now (all BrillKids’ license holders get free upgrades to the latest version of the software released). If you haven’t got Little Reader, you really, really can’t miss this one. We love Little Reader and I honestly didn’t think they could really improve upon it but they have!

What’s New in Little Reader Version 3:

  • Customizable Courses
    You now have full control of your course curriculum – edit your existing BrillKids courses OR create your own courses from scratch!
  • Playback Settings Presets
    Use Presets to easily apply playback settings to your categories or courses – you don’t have to manually set each playback option anymore!
  • Re-organized Playback Settings and Override windows
    They’ve overhauled the entire Playback Settings and Override windows to make it easier to navigate and use!
  • Game Mode
    To make reading time even more exciting and interactive, you can play a picture or word game at the end of each course lesson, or play a game based on your selected categories!
  • Split Mode
    With the new Split Mode playback setting, you can display words in split colors AND have pronunciations in split audio, where each part of the word pronounced separately for your child!
  • Child Profiles
    Using Little Reader with more than one child? Now you can keep track of each child’s lesson playback history with Child Profiles!
  • Subtitles and Translations
    Subtitles now show translations during playback – especially handy for teaching different languages! We’re also working on translating the software interface into several languages so you can use Little Reader in the language you’re more comfortable with!NOTE: Subtitle translations are provided courtesy of Google Translate
  • New Progress Diary
    They’ve revamped the built-in Progress Diary so that it updates itself whenever you edit or add new courses!
  • Performance Optimizations
    As with every update, they’ve fixed a lot of bugs and enhanced the software interface to make Little Reader easier to use!

It’s not just the software that’s been improved but the curriculum has been upgraded significantly, too!

What’s new in the Little Reader Curriculum:

They’ve added new lesson types – now you can show sight words, word split and game lessons to your child!

Also, all lessons are now shorter, more varied, and several times more exciting! Here’s an example of a typical day in Semester 1:

  • Picture Flash
  • Multisensory 1
  • Pattern Phonics 1
  • Multisensory 2
  • Pattern Phonics 2
  • Multisensory 3
  • Sight Words
  • Word Split
  • Game

More Stories
The complete Little Reader Storybook Series (25 storybooks) is now incorporated into the curriculum, starting from the very first day of Semester 2 (Day 131). All stories come with professionally-recorded pronunciations in three voices and colorful animated videos.

High-res Pictures and Videos
Pictures and videos have all been upgraded to high-definition versions to accommodate the ever-increasing screen sizes and screen resolutions. Animals and Transportation categories now come with animated videos in addition to real-life HD videos.

What We Especially Love about the New Little Reader

Hercules has been on the new Little Reader curriculum and these are our favourite bits:

  • Personal profile – he loves seeing his picture up on top of the screen. This is also really helpful when you have two or more children going through the curriculum so you can easily keep track of who’s on which lesson.
  • New stories – he’s mad about the stories and keeps asking for them over and over even after the lessons are done. He also enjoys reading along with them – which is our first step to encouraging him to start reading on his own. Since he started reading along with Little Reader, I’ve noticed he’s been pulling out his own books and “reading” them to himself. The new stories were also great for me because I recently had a case of laryngitis and lost my voice so I couldn’t read aloud to Hercules. Hercules was happy to listen to Little Reader stories while Mummy’s voice recovered.
  • Games – up until recently, I have never really “tested” Hercules on his reading abilities. I was so concerned about “stressing” him and putting him off learning that I avoided it. The games setup of Little Reader is so fun that he enjoys playing it. It’s also great for me because I finally get to see just how much he can read (and all this time I thought he only knew colours, fruits, actions, numbers and transportation – because that was all he would point out to me without me asking).

If you would like to buy Little Reader from the BrillKids online store, you can get 10% off your purchase with the following code: BKAFF36716.


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Filed Under: flash cards, Products, Reading Tagged With: , , , ,

Dino-Mania – Our Recommended Dinosaur Resources

June 15, 2011 by 2 Comments

It is a well-known fact that children learn quickly and easily all the things that they want to learn. When they apply themselves to a task of their choosing, it is amazing what they can accomplish. Therefore it is the philosophy of many early childhood programs to follow your child’s lead. In fact, this is exactly what the Montessori Method and, if I’m not mistaken, “Unschooling” pedagogies preach.

Since Gavin was little, I have been trying to feed his interests (even before I knew about the Montessori Method or heard about unschooling) – from Thomas and Friends to the Human Body and now to dinosaurs. Ever since we went to Universal Studios in Singapore, Gavin’s interests in dinosaurs has gone into overdrive to the point of Dino-Mania. All he wants to learn about each day is dinosaurs. Unfortunately, because he has always shown very little interest in dinosaurs up until recently, I haven’t really bought him much by way of dinosaur books or materials to learn from. In an attempt to make up for lost time, I have been trying to enlarge his library of dinosaur books and dinosaur resources.

Firstly, we have the song that started it all – “I am a Paleontologist” by They Might be Giants from the album “Here Comes Science“. We have a Dinosaur Dot to Dot book – thanks to Aunty SM who bought this book for him. Gavin enjoyed the dot-to-dot activity and whizzed through almost the entire book within the first couple of days he got the book. Now that he is displaying a greater interest in the subject of the book, we are going back to read the information from it.

He has the Cat in the Hat Learning Library: Oh Say Can You Say Di-No-Saur? which I bought for him ages ago. And when we were at the Universal Studios shop, we bought him Step into Reading: Dinosaur Days. After reading it once, he surprised me by reciting the facts that he had read from it. Despite having read the book myself, I couldn’t recall those facts he recited until I looked back at the book and found that they were correct. Clearly, a child is interested in a subject makes learning appear effortless.

I bought him a Dinosaur Sticker Atlas which was similar to the Animal Sticker Atlas I bought for him some time back and we’ve been learning the names of new dinosaurs and the parts of the world that they appeared in. This activity involves sticking the stickers of the various dinosaurs on the continents that they were most commonly found.

Then there was the Dinosaur Paleontology Kit which I found in Toys ‘R’ Us. There are actually quite a number of brands in the market selling these kits. Personally, I reckon the novelty of this activity wears off after one kit.

At Toys ‘R’ Us, they have a great series of educational jigsaw puzzles by The Learning Journey. A couple of their titles are on a dinosaur theme. There are two parts to this puzzle – fix the jigsaw puzzle and find the cards.

We also got him the Top Trumps: Dinosaurs card game which we found in Toys ‘R’ Us Singapore. Each card offers the vital stats of each dinosaur – weight, height, length, age, intelligence, and killer rating. There is also a short paragraph about each dinosaur featured.

The World Almanac Puzzler Deck: Dinosaur Science – which is a similar concept to the Brain Quest card decks.

Gavin’s National Geographic Kids Ultimate Dinopedia arrived today and both Daddy and Gavin were tearing through it before bed time. We’ve also got the Magic School Bus: in the Time of Dinosaurs and the  on the way. I tried letting him watch the Magic School Bus the Busasaurus while waiting for the book to arrive but he got scared:

He didn’t seem to like the Land Before Time either:

Although he didn’t get scared looking at the life-size dinosaurs roaring away at the National Science Center, he seems to find the dinosaur cartoons on TV scary – go figure…

Online, we have Kids Dinos on the Kids Know It Network. They have games and interesting facts on Dinosaurs on this site. There are also plenty of terrific Dinosaur apps for the iPhone and iPad. They have a number of book apps, including the National Geographic Kids Ultimate Dinopedia (for iPad only) but I’d already bought the hardcopy by the time I found out about it. Many of the informative dinosaur apps can be quite advanced, especially for the younger children. Here are a couple that are great for young children:

There are a lot more interesting dinosaur apps available but these are all we’ve managed to get through so far.

I’ve also created a new set of linking memory cards with a dinosaur theme for Gavin. Gavin’s interest in linking memory was beginning to flag in recent times, but these new linking memory cards with the dinosaurs seems to have revived his interest. Download them here:

If you know of any other dinosaur resources that you highly recommend, please share them in the comments below.


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Filed Under: Activities, Books & Magazines, Education, flash cards, General Knowledge, Science, Toys Tagged With: , , , , ,

Right Brain Resources: Linking Memory Flash Cards

May 25, 2011 by 10 Comments

Linking memory is one of the mainstay home practice activities for right brain education. I was initially working on creating a 1000 card deck of linking memory cards in sequence similar to the Shichida linking memory activity. Having practiced the activity with Gavin for some time, I felt that there was more value practicing a random linking memory activity than the sequential linking memory activity. I feel that random linking memory requires more right brain muscle because you (or your child) has to make up the story on the spot based on the pictures you see. This uses both right brain creativity and imagery. With sequential linking memory the story is already given to you and the same story is repeated session after session.

Unfortunately, the random linking memory activity requires me to prepare a new story for Gavin the night before and well, I’ve already confessed to being a lazy Mom, so I have been trying to find an easier way. This is version 1 of my “easier way”:

It is a deck of 392 linking memory flash cards that can be printed out or used on the computer. Unfortunately, it is a huge file because I was so anal about selecting pictures with a higher resolution that I ended up shooting myself in the foot so be prepared to wait a while for it to download. If you’ve downloaded my flash cards before, you will notice that the pictures are familiar because I’ve used them in other flash card presentations.

In retrospect, I’m not sure that this deck will be useful for practicing linking memory on the computer because it is very slow to load and may possibly crash a system that isn’t up for it – it was bad enough trying to work on the file! But if you have a powerful computer and if you can find a powerpoint shuffler, this deck will save you a lot of preparation time. All you have to do is shuffle the cards and you’re good to go.

Otherwise, you can print out the pictures (you can print as many as 9 slides to a page if you want to make them smaller and conserve paper) and use them as physical linking memory cards.

While I was thinking of how to decrease the size of my file, I thought of using a deck of linking memory cards with words instead of pictures. The idea of linking memory is to use your imagination to help you remember the items so you don’t really need the pictures. For instance, if you had to remember a shopping list – bread, noodles, yoghurt, insect repellent, and detergent – you could make up the following story:

The bread was hungry so it decided to cook up a packet of noodles but the noodles were so dirty that it had to be washed with detergent. The detergent was all covered with yoghurt which was attracting the insect repellent.

You would create mental images of a loaf of bread with a big mouth standing by the stove cooking up a packet of noodles. Then imagine that the noodles are covered with dirt and you’re sprinkling detergent over it. A big blob of yoghurt falls onto the detergent and a can of insect repellent with wings is hovering nearby. You wouldn’t really need a deck of linking memory cards with pictures to create this story in your head so word cards would work just as well as picture cards.

The other benefit of using word cards is that it can be a rather sly and devious method for testing your child’s reading ability. You don’t necessarily have to ask your child what the word says, but if you child gets excited about making up the story, he may get ahead of you and read the next word before you can tell him what it says. This is just another opportunity for your child to demonstrate what he has learned – only if he wants to, of course.

Here are the linking memory cards for download:


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Filed Under: flash cards, Right Brain Tagged With: , ,
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