User Reviews (1 - 11 of 37)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

The best reading and phonics game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 86 / 87
Date: April 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I own several phonics and reading games, and there's no doubt in my mind that the Reader Rabbit games are head and shoulders above the rest. The three main reading games: Learn to Read with Phonics, I Can Read With Phonics (also called Reading 6-9) and Reading 4-6 are absolutely a must for kids learning to read. No matter who the child is, if there's the ability to read in him/her, these games will get it out!

Learn to Read with Phonics is fantastic in that it such an incredible amount of stuff to do. Every letter has a land, and the child explores each land by going through phonics drills and reading two books. The books and the drills are divided into 5 levels, and each land requires finishing some phonics practice before the child can move on to the next. Alternatively, the parents can also elect to go to each land or each activity if they choose, so there is great flexibility here. Every word in the books is individually clickable, so the child can be certain to learn how to say each word. The drills are not particularly demanding, so even if the child doesn't know much, as long as he goes through the drills he can move on to the next level. He is not stuck there until he gets it all right, but even this can be adjusted by the parent.

Learn to Read with Phonics is a game, but not in the normal sense. There's phonics drilling here, meaning that this is actually glorified homework. If you just let your child do it on his own, he will do it for a while, like my 5 year old son did, but he will probably get tired of it after a few hours and will not go through the entire journey. (Girls are probably better at this than boys.) I got the games to homeschool my kid. I require that he finishes 5 letterland a day, and I make sure that reads out each letter in the books by individually clicking on them. This takes him an hour (longer when he gets to the end of the journey when the levels get harder and the books get longer.) When he's done, I let him have a small bag of chips. He seems to find the deal acceptable. When he is all the way through, I make him start from the beginning again.

Repetition isn't necessarily fun, but that's how people learn. I find the computer invaluable at teaching little kids. At their stage, there's more repetition than anything else, and as a formal college teacher, I don't look forward to teaching little kids stuff to my kids. The computer is perfect for the job because it never gets bored, tired, impatient, or a sore throat from saying "See Jane run" too many times.

The difference between Learn to Read with Phonics and I Can Read with Phonics is their levels: one is for ages 4-6, and the other one is for 6-9, but the age group is really arbitrary. If your child has trouble reading, he/she can benefit from both CDs. They are two totally different games, and together with Reader Rabbit Reading 4-6, which is still a different reading game, makes a perfect package as a computer reading teacher.

I highly recommend this product to anyone.

Note: another reviewer here says that this game may not run on XP. Not true. I have XP and all three Reader Rabbit reading games run just fine on it.

Learning to Read with Reader Rabbit

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 68 / 68
Date: July 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I ordered this software for my almost 4 year old who loved the Reader Rabbit Toddler software, but had outgrown it. To get the most out of it, your child should have the ability to hold and click a mouse, and should already have basic recognition of capital and lower-case letters. The lowest level is perfect for my child but would have been too difficult at ages 3 - 3 1/2. The software teaches both letter and word recognition as well as phonics. The games are cute and when your child gets tired of learning to read there are fun songs and graphics to listen to with "reading propaganda" lyrics about how fun and important it is to learn to read.

Just the ticket

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 60 / 60
Date: February 10, 2002
Author: Amazon User

When our 5-year-old got into kindergarten, we were surprised to find out how much they expect out of kids that age nowadays.

Just 5 years ago, when our first one was kindergarten age, they used that time to start to introduce reading concepts. Now, they expect them to know the basics already and just delve into more advanced topics. Even the teacher said she's still getting used to the new level they're expected to teach at.

So, we had to do outside catch-up work, and this program was right on-target. It led our kindergartener step-by-step to a firm grasp of the material - his improvement was immediately visible. And he's had so much fun that he hates to stop playing.

This is a combination of two programs that were previously separate. The first one (Road to Reading) goes through each letter of the alphabet and reinforces the sound of the letter, plus presents site words using that letter. The second one (Word Factory) picks up there and introduces how to build words from the basic sounds.

I should probably point out that this program does not include any tutorial material, so it can't be used by itself to teach a child phonics. It is, however, a great set of exercises to practice and extend what they've learned elsewhere.

I would also recommend that this be used with some amount of parental involvement. In spite of its game-like format, it should probably be treated more like homework, having an adult available to get them started and to make sure they're using each concept correctly.

My daughter learned to read by her fourth birthday

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 26 / 27
Date: December 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

(...)We moved to Japan, and I ordered the Reading with Phonics game.
She used to play about an hour a day sometimes, she just loved it. I would also play school with her sometimes, and we read lots of stories together every night at bedtime.

English spelling is quite difficult, because it is so irregular. However, we were surprised to find our daughter could read through books that she had never seen before, or only been read a few times, by the time she was nearly four. On her fourth birthday, she could read through a book like "Bunnycakes", with two or three sentences per page.

I give a fair amount of credit to the Reader Rabbit games, as well as Blue Clues reading games. My wife was not keen on letting her play with the computer so much, but I think it was
quite effective for teaching the brute rote memorization needed to pronounce English spelling, and to become familiar with
letter combinations such as "ch", "sh" , "gh", etc, and their irregular rules.

As a side benefit, our daughter can type pretty well and
use both mouse and trackpad. (...)

Best learn to read software program

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 15
Date: February 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is absolutely the best learning to read software game currently available. It's so rich! Kids learn phonics and sight words. Parents of impatient kids, beware. There is quite a bit of repetition in this game. But it does the job really well. If you want real, tangible results with a reading software game (and that is hard to find), try this game out.

A "must-have" for beginning readers....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: April 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is one of those "must-have" items if your child is learning to read...

We were sorry that we hadn't bought it sooner. Our daughter is the youngest child in the class, and was having trouble with reading due to easy distractibility. We tried to "force her" to concentrate, which was both frustrating and futile.

After purchasing this CD, and the companion "I Can Read with Phonics" from Amazon, the child began to play the games and fell in love with it. Every night, she insists on playing for as much as 2 hours at a time! She does not need to be forced to learn because she is having fun, and is less aware that she is actually learning and increasing her skills.

If your child is in Kindergarten and you want a head-start, or the child is in first-grade and having difficulty, I highly recommend this CD.

Awful! Did anyone test this before shipping???

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: January 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Okay, it works. That's the good news. The program does what it was programmed to do. Otherwise is is awful.

Our four year old has been using the program for about a week now and we hate it. She enjoys the stories and the general layout of the game but has a very hard time with the actual tasks. I sat with her and tried to help only to find that I had a hard time with it as well.

In every "letter world" there are a list of things you have to complete. First you click on four things in the picture that start with the letter you are looking for. Then you go into the cart with the hamsters.

In the hamster cart you have three tasks. The first is to correctly identify the word that the hamster says from three possibles. The problem is that the hamster is very hard to understand as he sounds like a hamster rather than a well articulated person trying to teach a small child.

The next section is a fill in the blank area. There are three pictures of three letter words (cat, bus, etc.). Under the words are three blanks. Some of these blanks are filled in but not with letters that belong in the word!!! Sometimes there are X's in the spaces, sometimes random other letters and sometimes they are all blank. Then, with NO OTHER INSTRUCTION WHAT SO EVER, you are given 5 letters and expected to fill them in. The problem is that you are expected to fill in only the first, last or middle letter and they don't tell you which they are looking for. I can do this game. I know how to read and how to spell small words like bus. My daughter is learning to read and doesn't understand when looking at the words "dog, gum and bus" that the computer is looking for her to fill in the last letter just based on the available choices. She starts sounding out the word dog and wonders why there isn't a "d" in the pile to choose from.

When you leave the hamsters you go to the book section where the computer reads you a small story. This is fine except that on some of the pages the computer won't let you go to the next page until you click on something in the picture. But it doesn't tell you what it wants you to click on. My daughter's answer to this has been to randomly click all over the picture so that she can hear the rest of the story. It works but I hardly think it's teaching her anything at that point.

I think this is a worthless program that has confused her much more than it has helped. It seems as though the people writing it forgot that the target audience doesn't know how to read. When you are trying to teach someone who doesn't know how to read you need to speak clearly and slowly. You need to be consistent and you need to tell them what they need to do. This program is hard to understand, counter-intuitive and wildly inconsistent. It is not worth buying.

First Rate!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: August 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is an excellent early reading CD-ROM. Buy it here, since most stores only stock games and the more lackluster "educational" programs.

Good product, but no support and some technical issues

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: February 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

My 4-year-old son likes this software quite a bit and has learned a solid amount from it. Many of the activities are well conceived, fun, and motivating. However, quite a few of them are weak in that random clicking works just as well as making thoughtful responses. I've had to remind my son to think about his answers before clicking, and this has worked to help reinforce the learning. All in all, with guidance I think this software does a tremendous amount of good. It helps especially with word recognition and phonics.

The game runs on Windows XP, but there is a bug with the piano word-completion game. Your child is shown some simple pictures that represent three-letter words. Below the word are three boxes representing the letters of the word. What is supposed to happen is that you're given the second and third letters; you then complete the word by dragging the missing first letter from a row of letters given lower on the screen to the empty box respresenting the first letter of the word. However, the second and third letters of the words are either blank or simply incorrect. "Hat" for example is supposed to have a blank, then an "a" and a "t". Intead it might have two blanks followed by an "l". This can be confusing, especially when your child is trying to sound out words. Still, with guidance your child will get through this, and it's only one of several activities on the disk.

Although the CD says that the game will work on Mac OSX, when I tried to run the program under OSX 10.4 (Tiger), the launcher tried to boot OS9 in order to run the main program. Saying that the program runs under OSX is misleading and incorrect. Mac users beware.

Support for the game is non-existent, as far as I can tell. I downloaded a patch to try and fix the buggy piano game, but that simply stopped the program from loading altogether and necessitated a reinstall from scratch. Somewhat of a pain since my son was halfway through his "road to reading" adventure, and had to start again.

Still, problems withstanding, this has been one of our best software purchases for our son. We've easily spent a productive 10 hours with it, and I'd say there are at least another 20+ good hours of learning left for my son to do. Just try to get it from some place that will let you return it if it doesn't work to your satisfaction.

No technical support and no upgrades

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: October 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game was bought for my son 1-2 years ago when he was a toddler. Now that he's four we started using it. There is an error in the piano game that basically teaches your child how to spell words incorrectly putting in lots of incorrect letters at random. The piano game features prominently in many of the exercises, so you basically have to do a work around throughout the entire process.

What really gets me though is 1) I recently bought what I thought was an upgraded version of the game only to find the problem had not been fixed by the manufacturer 1) there are no patches or upgrades available to fix the problem, 2) the manufacturer states on their website that they will not give a refund for this game. Buyer beware.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 Next 

Actions