Looking for educational material to teach a young child the alphabet and basic phonics? Do you also prefer to download
the material for use offline? Yourchildlearns.com caters for these needs free of charge.
This website provides a software called "Learn
Letters" - three sets of drill exercises graded according to difficulty. Level one provides outline to help a child learner assemble the shape of each letter from A to Z. In level two, the outline appears and disappears. As the little learner progresses to level three, there is no line as the names of letters are called in random.
The softwares to learn basic phonics called " Letter Sounds" - five sets of games. Out of these, three to learn consonants and two to learn vowel sounds. "Letter Sounds" are available online and for download.
After that there is a reading
exercise called " Bridge to Reading" which is a series of simple illustrated stories.
However, patience is required to work with the downloaded softwares. For example in "Learn Letters", when the program is opened, a user has to wait for a fork-lift carrying the tail of letter g to meet up with the letter o at tortoise speed. When the user has begun a drill exercise, there is no avenue to close the program until the whole exercise is completed.
Fast learners might get bored quickly. Slow learners, especially children with reading difficulty problem would benefit from the slower pace of learning.
Then there are puzzle games to learn about maps and printables for fun projects such as constructing a castle, coat of arms, town, village and a farm. A note on the map puzzle games : they are fun and challenging not only for children but also for some adults!
Overall, the learning materials are practical and of fine quality albeit "old school". The syllabus is more oriented to American schools.