Early Childhood Education: Early Learning

Posted on techlearning.com eZine July 2006
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PDQ (Professional Development QuickTips)
Free Software for Young Children
Early Learning

Tip:Marianne Wartoft from Uppsala, Sweden has been developing educational shareware programs since 1995. Now these wonderful interactive programs are available as freeware at Marianne Wartoft ab.
Minisebran offers early learning games for 2-6 years olds, including doodle drawing exercises and very simple games to get to know numbers, letters, and the keyboard.
Sephonics includes seven different exercises for practicing English pronounciation and the phonetic alphabet, including a phonetic memory game to relax between the lessons! There are also exercises where you learn to match a sound to a phonetic sign, transcribe from phonetic text to ordinary text, and much more! (British English)
Selingua is a vocabulary training program with six different exercises for practicing vocabulary and verb inflections, including a crossword exercise. Users can also add their own words to the dictionaries, which already have more than 2000 words in each of the following languages: English (both American and British), German, Spanish, French and Swedish.
She offers other freeware for other age groups, and all work on PCs. In order to run Minisebran, you need Windows 2000 or Windows XP. You also need the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed on your computer, but if you are running Windows XP, it is probably already installed.