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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: , , , ,

Early Literacy – How Important is it to get an Early Start?

September 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

There is an interesting article on early literacy on the Pacific Standard written by Janet Hopson (contributor to Scientific American, Smithsonian, and Psychology Today) titled: “Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?” It is a very long article but a very good read (if you care to take the time to go through it, otherwise you can read the general conclusion I have derived from it below). There are a lot of articles about infant reading – whether it’s good, whether it’s bad, whether it’s possible, etc. This article gives a well-balanced view to the whole argument putting forward the science, the misconstrued beliefs, and the bottom line.

So what’s the bottom line?

Early readers are smarter later in life

Although children who learn to read from age 6 onwards are not necessarily doomed to be mediocre readers or possibly even be susceptible to dyslexia, they are still disadvantaged compared to children who learn to read earlier (during the critical period for developing spoken language, that is, from birth to age 6). Early readers end up being smarter later in life because:

“A fast start to reading unlocks an upward spiral of skills, achievement, positive attitudes, and willing practice. Conversely, a slow start tends to touch off difficulty, discouragement, dislike, and avoidance.”

From: Early Reading Acquisition and Its Relation to Reading Experience and Ability 10 Years Later (Developmental Psychology: 1997, Vol. 33, No. 6, 934-945)

And here’s the critical paragraph highlighting the reason why:

The early reader’s steady ascent can explode into a towering geyser of literacy because, Cunningham explains, reading is largely self-taught and begets its own mastery. Only through reading—not listening to talk—can a youngster expand his or her mental lexicon enough to allow truly fluid reading, with its rapid line-by-line scanning and its effortless absorption of meaning. Cunningham and Stanovich cite earlier statistics showing that a fifth grader in the lowest percentiles for time spent reading typically devotes less than a minute per day to independent reading and encounters 21,000 written words in a year. A classmate at the 50th percentile will spend an average of about five minutes per day reading independently and encounter 282,000 written words. A fifth-grader at the 98th percentile will spend more than an hour a day and input almost 4.4 million words that reinforce the mental dictionary. “Those who read a lot will enhance their verbal intelligence,” write Cunningham and Stanovich, “that is, reading will make them smarter.” And, they add, this goes for good readers and struggling readers alike.

So what can parents do to help their children get started on the road to literacy early?

  • read actively to their children daily
  • play simple alphabet and phonics games

BUT!

Don’t pressure! A child who feels pushed into early reading and senses parental impatience or disapproval could become discouraged. Far worse than reading at a later age would be missing out altogether on the wonder and fountain of learning that reading brings.

In other words, do it as a fun activity in a pressure-free environment. Do it as a way to spend more quality time with your child and don’t worry about whether your child is picking up any of it because (s)he will (as long as you don’t obsess about it).

Handwriting practice helps reading

There was also another point that the article highlighted that I thought was very interesting. It is the question on writing skills. In this day and age of technology, it is easy to overlook handwriting skills because it seems almost unnecessary now, but learning how to write letters can help reading skills.

“French cognitive scientist Stanislas Dehaene and others have been methodically scanning kids and grown-ups to see where the ability to read resides in the brain. Dehaene nicknamed a region in the left hemisphere’s visual cortex “the brain’s letterbox.” In a fluent reader, this small area recognizes strings of letters, then rapidly signals to nearly a dozen other left-brain areas. The result is the lightning-fast decoding of letter and word sounds but also the retrieval of word meanings from a potentially vast mental dictionary. Readers need phonics to sound out unfamiliar words, but they also need vocabulary and general world knowledge to comprehend text. Recent research by Karin James at Indiana University also shows that a learner’s “letterbox” works most actively while printing letters, not just recognizing ABC’s or touching them on an iPad. This, James explains, is because the child must imagine each letter mentally before creating it on paper.“

The paper by Karin James is rather technical. For an easier read, you might like to check out this article instead: How Handwriting Trains the Brain by Gwendolyn Bounds.

So there you have – learn to read early and practice handwriting.


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Filed Under: development, Education, Reading, Writing Tagged With: , ,

When it Comes to Learning How to Read – Earlier is Better

September 23, 2011 by 1 Comment

The benefits of early literacy are many (more reasons here). Here’s why:

In a study from the University of Leicester, they found that early word recognition is key to lifelong reading skills.
- Science Daily

This is because:

  • A child’s early reading experience is critical to the development of his lifelong reading skills.
  • The age at which a child learns words is key to how he will read later in life.

According to Dr Tessa Webb in the School of Psychology at the University of Leicester: “Children read differently from adults, but as they grow older, they develop the same reading patterns. When adults read words they learned when they were younger, they recognise them faster and more accurately than those they learned later in life.”

What about the children in Finland who only start formal schooling at the age of 7?

I’m sure most parents would have heard by now that Finnish students were one of the best performers in reading in a global comparison. This argument has often been brought up to cite an example of why early literacy isn’t important. Unfortunately, this argument is flawed. Here’s why:

  • Finnish language advantage – the Finnish language is much easier to learn compared to other languages due to its logical structure (which other languages lack).
  • Many Finnish students are able to read by the time they start school – before entering first grade, 43% of Finnish children in a study were classified as emergent readers and 30% as precocious readers.
  • Although school age readers in Finland catch up with preschool readers very quickly, it was found that in the longer term, “early readers were likely to be more fluent readers in the second grade than those who learned to read at school”; that “phonemic awareness is more likely to predict reading fluency in later reading”; and that “phonological awareness at the preschool age predicted fourth graders’ reading fluency”.

So even in Finland, we see the trend that early readers maintain their advantage over later school-age readers. The short of the long is: earlier is still better when it comes to learning how to read, and the good news is that teaching a younger child to read is actually much easier than teaching an older child to read so the advantage of starting early is all-round – parents, children and teachers all benefit.


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Filed Under: Reading Tagged With: ,
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