Customer Reviews

Color Phonics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I received Color Phonics 2 years ago at a homeschool convention. At first my 3yo & 5 yo sons got very little out of it...the three year old was confused by the voice saying the word where his mouse was right after the word he was supposed to look for. The five year old was bored, though he is easily bored. Now, I'm finally using it...each child (ages 3, 4.5, and almost 7 now) is required to play 15 minutes of Color Phonics before they may use their edutainment CDROMs. This has worked wonderfully...the content of Color Phonics is marvelous, and is helping my speech delayed 4.5yo to distinguish the different sounds. The almost 7yo has been struggling with reading (due we believe to binocular vision), and having the color coding is a great asset for him. (The 3yo doesn't get a lot out of it yet, but she will...she is also language delayed, so she's just not ready for it yet.) Yes, the program requires a bit of motivation not necessary with edutainment...but it wasn't designed as edutainment...it was designed to teach.

I ordered these CD's for my 8 year old Dyslexic son. Although the content is great for teaching sounds of letters and phonomes, it lacked the ability to keep either of my children interested for more than 5 minutes. I'm sure he could learn a great deal from these if they were interesting but I found Spelling blaster and Reading Rabbit much more useful. I found myself board out of my skull trying to work with him on these and I don't bore easily. I then tried to use them to teach my 3 year old and had the same results. If your child is able to concentrate for long periods of time these CD's would be very useful. I was also not able to adjust and skip the lower levels to get to where my sons level was. We never made it to the useful part. The idea is great, but it needs some type of fun and reward system to make it work.

Despite a few software flukes, this program worked well for our son. He was reading before he turned five, with little effort on our part, except encouragement to keep on playing the games. I have looked at other phonics programs that cost more and prefer this to the Phonics Game, Fast-track Phonics, etc.

This phonics program follows the "Rev Up for Reading" cd-rom.
First of all this program is designed to teach your child phonics, it is not "edutainment." The program contains five cd-roms and an instruction manual. Each cd-rom focuses on a different element of phonics: consonants, vowels, consonant blends, short vowel stories and long vowel stories. The sounds are color coded so your child will learn both phonics and their colors. Within the program there is a teacher center where you can track your child's progress. There is a focus learning system which can be set up to reinforce weak areas. This is great for teaching a child to read, utilizing for remedial reading or teaching English as a second language.

I have taught Kindergarten for 8 years. I like the color coding and the excellent way they show the children HOW to make each sound properly. The reinforcement games of fishing for the correct letter or the given sound are well done. The main program is better played on the timed mode because otherwise it is too slow and boring. It is not engaging for long periods of time, but if you can get a child to do it...it would be worthwhile. It is a sound program except my criticism of it is that the stories concentrate so much on word families and rhymes, that they are not "readable" when it comes to understanding and comprehension.
For example,the story "The Brook Hook" reads as follows: "A crook cast a hook into the brook. He hoped to hook a fish to cook. The fish took a look at the brook hook. The fish took a look above the brook and saw the crook. The crook would not cook a fish tonight."
I feel like I am reading Dr. Seuss' "Fox in Socks" (which is an excellent read, but too difficult for a beginning reader.) Phonics should be a tool for decoding and sounding out words for fluent reading WITH understanding.

I tried this software on 3 of my children. They thought it was cute for about 5 minutes, but after that it was the same and very monotonous. Don't waste your money.

Color Phonics is a new color-assonant pronounceable text system incorporated into a learn to read program on five CD-ROMs. It emphasizes speech and auditory discrimination. It has animated cross-sectioned heads pronouncing the 43 phonemes of American English.