Consonant Blends and Digraphs

Reviewers: Belle Wong, parent, Hayley (6) and Sheri (7), E.B. Phin Public School
Pickering, Ontario, Canada
EMail address: belle.wong@home.com

Consonant Blends and Digraphs
Designed by Tenth Planet for Sunburst Communications
http://www.sunburst.com
Win/Mac CD-Rom
$85.95 (includes Teacher's Guide)
Minimum system requirements:
Windows: 486/DX2-66 MHz with 8 MB RAM, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, Microphone, Sound Blaster card or equivalent Macintosh: 25 MHz 68030 processor, 8 MB RAM (with 5 MB available), System 7.1 or higher, Microphone
Date reviewed: February 14, 2000
WAYCOOL rating: 8 out of 10, Cool.

Consonant Blends and Digraphs is the fourth title in the Tenth Planet Literacy Series. The series concentrates on developing phonics skills to help children become better readers, spellers and writers. This particular title focuses on hearing consonant blends and digraphs and connecting these sounds to letter patterns. We tested the software over the course of a week on a Pentium 90 with 24 MB RAM.

Consonant Blends and Digraphs offers six different activities aimed at the Grade 1 or 2 child:

1. Picture Sorting. In this activity, students sort pictures into different bins based on their beginning consonant sounds. There is also an "explore" mode in which the student must also correctly label the sorting bins.

2. Word Families. Students are presented with a selection of beginning consonant sounds which they then combine with a common word ending to create a variety of words.

3. Word Scramble. In this activity, students are presented with a picture and must build the word that matches the picture. Students do this by clicking on and dragging a letter from a provided set of letters onto the word building line, where they then must arrange in correct sequence.

4. Word Ladders. This challenging activity requires students to build a series of words by changing one consonant sound in each word to create the new word.

5. Twister. In this activity, students compose tongue twisters by dragging pictures having the same initial sounds onto each of three blank lines. There is also an "explore" mode, in which students choose from a set of pictures and words to create their own tongue twisters containing as many words as they wish.

6. Who Am I? Students build sentences that form clues to the riddle "Who Am I?" for their classmates to work on. Students are shown a picture which is the subject of the riddle, and must write a series of clues using a provided word palette.

In each of these activities, a handy speaker button allows students to hear words they have just built, or in the case of the Twister and Who Am I activities, to hear the tongue twisters spoken and the clues to riddles read out. Additionally, each student is provided with the following tools:

Journal - The journal allows students to save their work. Teachers can access the journal pages to assess a student's progress, and there is a space for comments to be added by the teacher. The convenient speaker button will read aloud any teacher's comments. Students also have the option of recording themselves reading aloud their work. Journal entries can also be printed out.

Word Bank - Each student also has a personalized word bank to which he or she can add any newly built words. The word bank is available for use in the Twister and Who Am I activities, allowing students to complete these activities using words they have encountered in their other activities.

Word Building Tool - In addition to saving words from activities into their word bank, students can also work with the word building tool, which allows them to build whatever words they want. These words can then be saved to their individual word banks. The speaker function is a great tool here, because it allows students to hear how their words sound and fix any mistakes.

Word Study Notebook - This feature allows students to organize their word bank words into separate pages based on common consonant blends or digraphs.

We found the program easy to work with. The videos and music which open each activity are very impressive and captivating. Both the speaker button and the microphone button are particularly good tools, and I found that the children had more fun with the software when they used these tools liberally.

My reviewers found the Word Ladder, Word Scramble and Who Am I? activities the most enjoyable. The Word Families activity was a little bit boring - while the child can create new words using the common word ending and the palette of consonant sounds, there wasn't any challenge because all of the provided consonant sounds or blends matched with the word ending to create proper words. Also, some of the words created were unfamiliar words, and a "dictionary" component might have been helpful. For example, during one of our review sessions, the word ending was "edge", and we created words which included "dredge" - not a particularly familiar word in a Grade 1 child's vocabulary.

The Twister activity, which sounded promising, wasn't as much fun as it looked. This was mainly because tongue twisters need to be said quickly in order to produce the kind of verbal humor children find so appealing. Unfortunately, the speaker button activated the computer voice, which spoke the words in the same slow articulate way that was so much more valuable in all of the other activities. To get the most fun out of this activity, we would recommend saving the completed activity to the child's journal, and then using the recording button to record the child reading the tongue twister they have just created.

All in all, this was a nice program. The idea of each child having an individual word bank made up of words they've worked with or created is particularly appealing, as is the journal tool. The videos which precede each activity and which could also be played through the video button were also very enjoyable and lively. However, we did find that many of the activities did not have the kind of pizzazz that would have engaged the attention of this particular age range for a longer period of time. Both my reviewers thought the software was fun, but once they finished an activity, they weren't particularly eager to repeat the activity using a new set of pictures/words.

We gave Tenth Planet Consonant Blends and Digraphs a WAYCOOL rating of 8.

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