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Computer Times
Editors' Choice DS Software My Virtual Tutor: Reading Review by Angie Kibiloski
My Virtual Tutor: Reading (Retail $29.99), from Mentor Interactive, is an educational aid that makes learning to read fun and engaging. It comes in 3 levels, Pre-K to Kindergarten, Kindergarten to 1st Grade, and 1st Grade to 2nd Grade. Each of the 3 levels has similar game play, just with more advanced vocabulary and activities as your child progresses. Each game has 6 different storybooks with which your child can learn to read. They are all positive stories, with simple, cute animations to aid in comprehension of the story, yet not distract from the words. There are several ways to interactively progress through each story, as well as other phonics activities, which are independent of the stories.
You will begin each storybook by listening to the Tutor read it aloud in Read to Me mode. Her voice is pleasant and soothing, helping to gain and hold your child’s attention. You can follow along with the highlighted words as she reads. If you would like to hear a word again, you can touch it with the stylus, or you can hear the entire page again. Next in the Explore mode, you listen to the story again, and while following along, are asked to answer questions about the page you were just read. In the I Can Read mode, you go through each page to find words that have been removed and made into question marks. To reveal the word again, you must perform activities like spelling a word correctly, tracing a letter, and recording yourself reading the page. The last reading mode is Paint. The Tutor reads the story again, while you use colored pencils and paint to create a drawing of a scene from the book. Throughout each mode, the Tutor gives your child positive comments designed to boost their confidence when they complete a task correctly, and encourage them to try again if they get something wrong. As you complete each storybook, you will unlock the next.
If your child gets tired of reading the books, they can move on to the Phonics section. Here, they can play fun little games that will teach them rhymes and spelling. The games are Starts, Rhymes, Contains, and Sound Out. Each game has 2 modes, Tutor and Challenge. The Tutor mode lets you practice with no limit to wrong answers, where as the Challenge mode only lets you have 3 wrong answers before you lose. In Starts, you must tap on the words that start with a given letter, as they float from one end of the screen to the other. In Rhymes you have to tap words that rhyme with the given word. Contains is like Starts, but the given letter can be anywhere inside the words. In Sound Out, you have to listen carefully to the word the tutor is saying, and then choose it from a list of words on screen. Each game has a different animation theme, like under water, or outer space.
The Quiz section of the game brings together all the skills that your child has learned in the other sections. You must answer 9 questions correctly in order to reveal and collect a fun prize. You might be asked to answer a question about the stories you have read, match a picture of an object to a word, unscramble letters to spell a word, or color a picture from one of the stories. There are 20 cute and animated prizes to collect. You may enter Parent Mode to gauge your child’s progress and improvement in the 4 play modes in each story. You will be able to see how long your child spent in Read To Me, Explore, I Can Read, and Paint modes. You can also see how well they have done in the Phonics games. You can see how long it took them to complete each game and how well they have mastered the exercise, based on a 3 star rating. You may have 3 different saved games at once, so up to 3 children can play on the same game card. My Virtual Tutor: Reading is a wonderful way to help make the process of learning to read fun for your children. They will be having a blast playing all of the various activities and enjoying hearing the stories, and will be learning without much effort. Their reading skills will improve quicker than you think, because they will want to come back again and again to play with this great game. The encouraging and sweet Tutor will put each child at ease and welcome them into her world of educational fun. This is a great game for every child who is in their beginning years of reading.
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