Piggy’s Birthday Present
Santa Cruz, CA — Learning in Motion is pleased to announce the release of another learning environment featuring the well-loved Piggy! Piggy’s Birthday Present is a CD-ROM for early learners that builds English language arts and mathematics skills. Like Piggy in Numberland before it, this program gives teachers only one problem—how to get their kids off the computer! Piggy’s Birthday Present uses the popular “dot-to-dot” activity to provide fun and learning. With each dot-to-dot picture they complete, children are engaging in a sequence of progressively more advanced activities in language and number sense. The program is based on research into early language and mathematics learning, and the more than 2,000 questions originate from time-tested curricula.
Piggy’s Birthday Present offers five murals in both mathematics and language arts. Students complete the murals, picture by picture, by answering questions at three different skill levels: kindergarten, first, and second grade. Whether in math or language arts, children alternate between content work and art work, and their learning potential increases via this “distributed practice.” After successfully completing the activity, students select from an array of paints, using the palette to color and customize their murals. Distributed practice, an important principle in educational psychology, is a perfect match for the dot-to-dot format, providing a systematic pattern of learning and playing, learning and playing.
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Murals for Language Arts and Mathematics |
In Piggy’s Birthday Present the research is solid, the activities classroom-tested, and the “kid-factor” high. Motivation and reward are keen in Piggy’s Birthday Present—students can print their pictures, search for hidden treasures, and receive special certificates. Sophisticated graphics and animation with whimsical characters and magical scenes all add to the fun. Also, Piggy’s Birthday Present is incredibly easy to play—there are no directions to read and Piggy’s friends Bee, Panda, and Baby Kangaroo are always nearby to help.
Mathematics and language arts activities provide a sequenced progression of concepts and skills. English language arts emphasizes sight recognition, phonics (sounds), and morphology (word structure). Mathematics activities stress four areas: numeral recognition, counting, numerical relationships, and arithmetic. Each mural is supported by exercises at the three difficulty levels; students (or teachers) simply select the appropriate level. In addition, the numbers in the math dot-to-dots can be heard in several languages—Spanish, French, Chinese (Mandarin), Italian, Japanese, and Indonesian!
Every mural contains several pictures focusing on a particular skill set. The Skills Summary feature gives teachers the content description for each mural at the easy, medium, or hard level. Students can work individually or in groups, and student work is always saved and recorded in the Skills Summary after every session.
Piggy’s Birthday Present was developed by ThoughtMakers, a core team of cognitive psychologists, software engineers, graphic artists, and musicians. The program was produced, tested, and modified as part of a research and development effort headed by Dr. J. Arthur Woodward and Ms. Jill Gilkerson, Department of Psychology, UCLA.
The school version of Piggy’s Birthday Present is shipped on two CD-ROMs with a Teacher’s Guide. The Teacher’s Guide offers classroom supports such as complementary activity suggestions. Piggy’s Birthday Present is priced at $39. Additional CD-ROMS are available for $15. Learning in Motion offers a free 30-day preview of Piggy’s Birthday Present to US and Canadian educational institutions. Contact Customer Service at (800) 560-5670. Piggy’s Birthday Present was designed by ThoughtMakers and published by Learning in Motion, Inc.
This program definitely attracts a crowd of children when it is on, and the attention span for the program was unusually high compared to many programs on the market. Kids were highly motivated to complete the murals and build up their stash of treasures.
Overall: Highly Recommended
—Online review for The Review Corner (http://www.reviewcorner.com)
...There’s a lot of excellent early math and reading practice to be found in these simple puzzles, and the program has the important features of good graphics, a responsive design and an engaging theme in an easy-to-use format.
—Ann Orr for Children’s Software Revue
(http://www.childrenssoftware.com)
This new program, the second in a series, breaks new ground in connect-the-dot puzzles. How? By putting hundreds of easy puzzles at a child’s fingertips and a fun surprise at the end.
...Incremental success keeps preschoolers glued to their seats.
—October 1999 review for Scholastic Early Childhood Today
(http://www.scholastic.com)
The program provides colorful settings and graphics that are age-appropriate. Audio prompts for directions and navigation are user-friendly for young children. Piggy’s Birthday Present could be used in a computer center in kindergarten or first grade for either individual or group practice in language arts or math. Teachers in grade two may find it useful as a remediation tool, and ESL students would benefit from the activities as well.
—A September 1999 review by the EvaluTech project of the Southern Regional Education Board
(http://www.evalutech.sreb.org)
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