Product Review: More.Starfall.com Annual Home Membership (preschool +)
Where children have fun learning to read!
I was hesitant to try More.Starfall.com on a free month demo because Bob and I limit Brooke’s screen time to just 20 minutes or less a day and we like to save that for Nighttime Crazy Transition Mode (NCTM for short). You know, that period in between getting off work, making dinner and having a crazy toddler that wants, no, needs you to read her a story or play with blocks RIGHT NOW! The few educational DVDs we have should really be called 10 minutes of Mommytime to get into her pjs. Hey, it works! Over the last month, those transition times have been replaced with Brooke and I checking out the More.Starfall.com home membership and it has been a blast. You have to be very click-happy in the system which I imagine will later be a good way to teach young kids to practice maneuvering online. Brooke is in the middle of a period of Enlightenment with learning her ABCs, colors and numbers and was so fascinated by clicking a letter of the alphabet to hear the sound and see a visual of what starts with that letter. We used to go through each letter before moving on to a new activity, but her latest favorite activity is telling me what letter she wants to see next. We would spend this wind down time with her directing my letter clicks. She may want to hear about W or Y five times in a row, but she eventually moves on to another letter or color. She seems to have a strange fascination with W (duh oh you), Y and V, but I am guessing this fetish will pass when she starts systematic phonics, right? She isn’t going to sleep with a W pillow in middle school or anything¸ right?
Starfall.com has been offering free phonics activities online to kids with a reading focus since 2002 and has branched out into other educational projects. Starfall focuses their learning activities and materials on the “Big Five” National Institute of Child Health and Human Development areas of phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Starfall also added a sixth area of development to the list that they find just as important as motivation. If you check the Starfall’s main page, you will see all the free activities that are available. Now Starfall has developed a complete learning system that looks like a great tool for home school parents and teachers in the classroom. However, I discovered there is more to Starfall than for educators through the annual home memberships through More.StarFall.com.
Home memberships to More.Starfall.com gives you access to all of the free content on the Starfall site plus a whole lot more activities for $35 for a full year. The home membership ($35/annual) gives you one account for your immediate family to be used on a maximum of three computers. It has a lot of features, such a K-2 Math, a Talking Library and phonics and much more I can’t even begin to type for fear my runoff sentence will actually run off. I am including the product information page so you can check it out: http://More.Starfall.com/info/join.php.
I recommend interested parents to check out Starfall.com and go through all the free phonics activities available and to see if getting an annual More membership would be a good idea for your family. Quite honestly, I may wait a few more months to buy an annual membership because we are currently getting the most out of the basic free phonics skills from the main page. However, after working on the More Starfall side for a month, I do see the benefits of it in a year or so and think the system offers a lot of great learning tools for early education. The other day I sat down with Brooke with color flashcards and was quite surprised at a few of the colors she knew (blue, red and purple) and I have to attribute that to the crayon color clicking activities available on More.Starfall. Even with the limited screen time we do in our family, I can tell it was making a difference to her basic learning skills which seems worth it.
Starfall Store: The Starfall Store offers many educational supplemental activities available for purchase. Check out the phonics puzzles and short vowel pal phonics books. Starfall has online program focuses in other education areas like special education, homeschooling and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL).
The Starfall Team: You may recognize Starfall supporters in the Polis-Schutz family, Stephen Schutz, Susan Polis Schutz and their son Jared Polis since their love of education comes through in their many endeavors. Susan was a teacher in New Jersey and New York City in the 1960s. In 1970, Stephen and Susan founded the Blue Mountain Arts publishing company. The couple began incorporating Jared in their family business through bluemountain.com. I find Stephen’s story to be the most inspiring. Despite his initial difficulties learning to read, Stephen overcame this obstacle and is a graduate from MIT and has a PhD in physics from Princeton University.
More.starfall.com Annual Home Membership (preschool +)
List price: $35.00 each year
Momma's Bacon 