Mom's point of view: Reading Kingdom Review

Are you looking for a program to help your children learn to read and use the computer at the same time? Then you should check out Reading Kingdom.

Most kids can do the reading program on their own after just a few lessons
It's fun and children enjoy doing it
It's created by Dr. Marion Blank, one of the world's top experts in literacy
It works with any other curriculum a child may be using
It's the only program to offer customized online reading instruction for each child
And, it's the only system that teaches all 6 skills needed for reading & writing success!

I decided to focus this program on my 5 year old son because he is just learning how to read. I homeschool my children and I am always on the lookout for new ways to teach my kids. The Reading Kingdom is a good program to help with it.

Now there are some Pros and Cons to this program. Let’s start with the Cons…

My 5 year old son enjoys the program but he does get a little irritated because he forgets which button to click on the mouse. The program has a time limit for how long you can try to figure it out. Which is a good and bad thing because you want your child to be able to figure it out quickly, but at the same time you want them to take their time and figure it out right. I know there is also a learning the mouse and keyboard section but after a while your child can get bored with that or at least my son did. I showed him which button on the mouse he should click and after a few times he finally got the right button.

He also has a hard time with holding the shift key and making a capital letter. He sometimes forgets to hold the shift key first so the program thinks he doesn’t type the right letter. He also tries to hold the keys at the same time but it can be a split second in between him pressing so he gets it wrong. That can be really frustrating to kids learning. He wants to give up when this happens but I encourage him to keep going. To me it seems like it is just a little too sensitive. Again I know that the program is helping your child learn so there isn’t much to be done about that.

Those are just a few things that cause frustration for my son. There are also many Pros as well…

The positives of the program is my son is learning to read more words because of Reading Kingdom. When the words come across the screen he says what the word is before he types them. He also is learning slowly how to type some letters. The program shows you how to type the letters by bringing up a keyboard and lighting up the letters that need to be pushed. When you get an answer right the program will cheer for you. Of course that is a great way to make any kid learn when they have positive reinforcement. I think if we were able to work with this program more it would be more helpful to him and he would pick up on the program a little quicker.

Here are a few screen shots of the program...

You can see in this picture below that the letters "s d" are the ones you are going to click with the mouse. Once you hover over the letter it turns yellow. You can see the "s" is yellow so you know that is the right letter to click.

In this picture it shows the letters that have already been chosen. The letters in green match the letters in black.

I thought this was a cute feature in the program. After some words were done correctly an image went across or came on the screen. This one the word is "toy" and a robot goes across the screen.