All my Words
Crick Software. PC. £? Available from Crick Software Ltd. 1 The Avenue, Spinney Hill, Northampton NN3 6BA  Tel: 01604 671691

A CD ROM of early literacy activities. Very easy to set up and install. On each page up and down arrows allow you to change to a different type of task, and forward and backward arrows to move to other pages. Alternatively, the program can be set up to move to the next page automatically.

There are activities supplied for every letter of the alphabet, colours and spelling groups. In a typical simple matching activity, a word in a short sentence is highlighted. A choice of words is offered in a grid below, one of which is a match for your word. When you click on the correct one, the next one is highlighted. There are some problems with letters with descenders (e.g. g) where the bottom of the letter is cut off by the grid making the words difficult to read. It is also possible to choose reinforcing sounds. By default there is no feedback for wrong answers—nothing happens unless you get it right, but all attempts are recorded and may be viewed in a report at any time. The speech program is very clear, and handles most words well. It seems to think that ‘bowl’ has an ‘ow’ sound as in ‘cow’—which could be confusing.

Where All My Words is most impressive, however, is in the ability to make your own materials. Creating pages of your own is a model of simplicity. In the page editor you can type in a piece of text, select a picture from a large collection of clear clip-art, and select the tasks which are to be associated with the page. Pages can be linked together to create progressive sequences of work. This means that just by typing one sentence, you can create a simple matching exercise, an exercise in matching from memory, a find and spell activity for each word, and a kind of text disclosure activity. This seems a very powerful and economical way of creating simple and appropriate word work.

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