![]() The letter sounds are said individually, and then the whole word. In the “Learn to Read” level, one of the activities allows learners to create words by dragging different consonants to different word families to make words to match pictures. As with all Starfall content, fun graphics and/or movement are included in videos to bring the concepts to life. The sound is also pronounced within the word. Then students hear the letter name and sound, as well as the letter presented in a word. When a letter is clicked on, it is presented on the screen. At this level, Starfall provides students with all the letters A to Z, in upper and lower case form. The first level teaches emerging readers about the ABCs. It is difficult to capture the variety of activities provided without checking it out for yourself on the website. Here are some examples of what is provided at each level. “ABCs,” “Learn to Read,” “It’s Fun to Read,” and “I’m Reading.” The levels, in order from the most basic to the most advanced are: Getting a membership unlocks a variety of additional content to teach reading and math, also through fun, interactive activities and games. Starfall is so popular that is has millions of visitors each month.Īs a publicly supported charity, Starfall is able to provide so much free content through member donations and membership purchases. Additional free demo games teach math concepts such as 3D shapes, telling time, and patterning.Īll games and activities use colorful graphics, engaging sounds, and motion to bring the concepts to life, making them engaging for the student. Many of the features of Starfall are absolutely free. Includes the popular All About Me avatar, phonics magic, rhyming tongue twisters, art, music, and poetry. Children learn to identify the shapes of words. Encourage your student to read books in order. ![]() On Classical Education: Repetition and the Habit o.Starfall was founded in 2002 and uses phonics and other word games to teach children to read for free. Contains Starfalls sequential phonics series of 15 books with fun letter-pal characters (Zac the Rat, Peg the Hen, etc.).There's actually quite a lot of information for parents. But I don't think that's a big deal: the games are what the kids are after, and if mine stray into areas that are less interesting, they look for help getting back to playing. However, they use a cookie to remember this, so even after I close a tab and come back, there are no further barriers. One cool feature is that they have "grown-ups" areas, which are protected by math problems: "What is twenty-five plus twenty-five?" Once you type in "50" then you can proceed to the parent-teacher area. I did notice that in some areas, you could toggle off Common Core, though I didn't see that it made any difference to do so. That being said, I haven't noticed any significant changes as we've used it before and after Common Core became a thing. If you are a parent that strictly avoids Common Core materials, then you'll want to know that Starfall is aligned to Common Core. Because the kids that are Starfall's audience are so young, it's not very effective to say, "This, but not this, is ok for school time." I would like it better if they stuck to things that are actually educational. I've wished many times that I could switch things to have them do this area in Japanese, but I haven't seen any foreign language materials at all on Starfall. My kids have really enjoyed this part of Starfall (it's part of the non-subscription materials), but to me it's frustrating to have them spend instructional time on things that are of so little value. In this area, they can customize the child, the bedroom, the pet. I did find that there are a lot more parent resources on the web version than the phone version - but I can't print from my phone anyway, so that worked out great. ![]() My screenshots are almost all from the phone's version, but the look and feel of the site is nearly identical. Not sure if that's novelty or what exactly is going on there, but she's doing well with it, and I'm happy with that. Interestingly, though my daughter has been somewhat lukewarm about doing Starfall on the computer for a while now, as soon as I put it on my phone, it became a favorite. ![]() You sign in with the same login as on the website, and that was all there was to the setup: easy as pie. They also suggested that we would enjoy having the Starfall app, which I downloaded to my phone. To make things even better, we got our log-in information just in time for Miss Kitty's 5th birthday! The kids have loved the free portions of Starfall for years - in fact, both the boys learned their letter sounds primarily from Starfall, and everyone has been curious about what's in the members-only sections of the site, so the kids were quite excited to find out that we'd be on this review, even the big kids. We received a one-year subscription to the The Starfall Home Membership from the Starfall Education Foundation for this review.
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