Starfall.com A Review of the Educational Website
Will a Child Learn to Read While Having Fun at Starfall.com?
Oct 4, 2009
Starfall is a simple to use site. A four year old can quickly learn to click on the letters and hear a rewarding sound.
The letters are animated and each click produces a picture and sound. The site will direct a young child where to click by using small animated pointers. Each screen contains bright colors, happy songs, and clearly pronounced words.
Teach a Three or Four Year Old to Read
After a child has learned the alphabet and corresponding letter sounds, the child can move to learning word families. Equally as simple to use as the alphabet section, the site teaches children word family groups such as the "an" family and "at" family. This area offers interactive stories and sounds out words to the children.
Children can progress from here at their own pace. Parents can reinforce lessons with printable materials on the website. These materials correspond to the stories the child reads on the computer and will help children learn to form their letters.
Teaching Sight Words for Kindergarten and First Graders
For the six to seven year olds, Starfall offers parents a way to teach sight words in a fun and engaging manner. Interactive stories like Not Too Little to Help are full of sight words and high frequency vocabulary which will help children become faster readers. The characters will move when the children click on them. At the end of these stories, the children are asked to rate the story.
Website Safety and Violence
The site is self-contained so there is no downloading involved to play. There are no pop-ups or pop-under advertising and the site is free of outside advertising. Starfall does sell materials so there are areas in which the website self-advertises. It would be difficult for a child to navigate away from Starfall while playing. There is no violence depicted on the site. All of the material is age appropriate.
Starfall.com also contains calendars and holiday specific flash games. Children can make a snowman, create a calendar, decorate a jack-o-lantern, and learn about gingerbread men. Parents can use these areas to reinforce lessons learned at school.
This site is rewarding and fun for younger children. Children will smile while reading and learning. The site is limited in its interactivity so children older than seven might become bored easily. However, the pre-school aged child will enjoy it and be completely unaware of the education he or she is receiving.
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