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A to Z in a CD
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Animated, interactive CDs to help kids learn English
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Fun all the way T-Kid CDs
As nursery rhymes get imprinted on a child’s mind, they are a big resource to teach languages. “T-Kid” exploits the language teaching potential of rhymes such as “Little Jack Horner” and “Old Mother Hubbard”
in a novel way. In an animated, interactive T-Kid CD (for age group 4 to 7), nursery rhymes with missing words have to be completed by dragging and placing appropriately blocks that contain the necessary words.
Sample this: “Mary had a little ---/ Its fleece was white as ---/ And everywhere that---/ The lamb was---/” is accompanied by the blocks “Sure to go.”, “Snow,”, “Mary Went,” and “Lamb”. Every nursery rhyme has a descriptive picture, but only some have their tunes playing in the background.
As other exercises, the young learner is required to type antonyms, homonyms, plurals and past tenses of given words and make sense of strings of scrambled letters. To make the process exciting, points for right answers are added to a counter. A set of pre-set answers are appended to every exercise; and right answers that lie outside this set are not accepted. So, expanding “FN” to “FAN” invites an error sign because the software programme is looking for “FUN”. Two other interactive CDs aimed at younger children are more colourful. On the downside, every musical piece is heard more than once and some animated characters have uninteresting movements. For example, boys playing outside a house from which alphabets emerge, keep kicking footballs endlessly. But it is difficult to find fault with anything else in the CDs.
The one for children between 4 and 6 years introduces the learner to, among other things, simple sentences. In combinations of four or five, the words “an, a, any, some, what, where, who, when, in, on, at, is, am, are” are offered as options next to sentences with missing words. This CD allows the child to take print-outs of worksheets aimed at language building. The CD for the youngest lot (from ages 3 to 5), teaches children alphabets by displaying them in lower and upper cases along with words and objects that go with them. Through other exercises, names of colours and shapes are taught. In all the three CDs, Sammy the toad plays companion to the young learner – the amphibian pops up and celebrates every correct answer.
Considering what they offer, the Rs. 95 for each CD seems reasonable. For more details, log on to tkid.in and thinkingcentre.com (19/6, Wheatcrofts Road, Nungambakkam).
PRINCE FREDERICK
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
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Kochi
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Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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