Clever games and bright screens enliven phonics activities
in this encouraging program that helps children develop essential phonics skills.
Part of the Flash Action series by School Zone Interactive, Phonics
Made Easy features a nice blend of electronic flash card activities and unique
games that incorporate academic content.
The program features four sets of activities that develop skills in phonics
sounds, vowels, rhymes, and blends and digraphs. Once children have completed
enough activities in each set, a game is unlocked. The flash card activities
include completing words, "drawing" lines to connect related pictures and words,
building cars to spell words and match rhyming words, typing in letters to complete
words, and more. Children work with rhyming word families, associate words with
the same beginning or ending sounds, and identify letters and groups of letters
as those with long vowel sounds, short vowel sounds, blends, and digraphs.
For each of the four categories, a meter runs alongside the screen that helps
children visualize how much of the category they have completed before a game
is unlocked. Congratulatory animations appear from time to time—fun characters
cheer and dance across the screen as rewards for correct answers. The games
include painting activities, silly sentences, playing with rhyming families,
and "blend and bend". These games are unique in that they incorporate phonics
exercises into play time. Kids can watch animations of the silly sentences they
have built, add letter blends onto the board to create fun designs, and so forth.
The program's exercises are varied and the narration is exceptionally clear
and encouraging. Letters and blends are sounded out for extra reinforcement.
Pictures of words can sometimes confuse young children when they don't know
the intended word that is associated with the illustrations. Fortunately, the
program allows children to move their cursor over a picture in order to hear
a clearly spoken word, thus eliminating any confusion.
Phonics Made Easy is a positive and unique program that features useful
academic content for children in first to second grade. In fact, it would be
most appropriate used as a review of first grade material. Only one activity
(the bonus questions) confused child testers at first. They had a difficult
time distinguishing between the terms "blends" and "digraphs". Otherwise, the
program is suitable for independent play. Children found the program very motivating,
worked hard to unlock the games, and stuck with the exercises even after all
the games were unlocked.
