Monday, November 7, 2011

TOS Review: Ooka Island Books

 

 

 

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I don’t know about you, but teaching my child to read was the most scariest thing I have encountered since starting to homeschool. Just something about that task that seems so scary. I’m happy to announce that I was lucky and little monkey picked it up quite quickly, but I was always thankful for sites like Ooka Island Books that helps you along the way with a bit of reinforcement.

Ooka Island is an interactive site that allows your child to play while learning to read. What child doesn’t love that? Right??!

First off it is a program that takes up almost 2 gigs of hard drive space on your computer. (Luckily we have a computer just for our monkey’s learning materials, sites, etc.) Little Monkey was eager to check this out, but had to be very patient. I think all said and done it took about 6 hrs for it to download.

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When she was finally able to log on, she was very excited. She wandered around on the site for a bit, and then we had to get ready to leave for something… A day later we came back to it, and we couldn’t get much further than the log in screen. Been stuck there ever since. She is a bit disappointed.. and we have been in touch with the Tech support, and they are still trying to figure out what the problem is.

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So unfortunately we can’t tell you much more about the game. Here is what the company says:

Ooka Island Inc. is an educational company that offers online, independent, reading curriculum for children in Pre-K to 2ndGrade. Ooka Island is for the 21st Century early learner on both the PC and Mac and effectively combines entertaining gaming theory with scientifically proven reading methods. OokaIsland is based on the literacy methods and research of its Founder, Dr. Kay MacPhee. MacPhee's initial literacy intervention program was rated #1 in Reading Comprehension by the US Department of Education in 2008.
Features Unique to Ooka Island:
An online, independent, reading curriculum that blends print concepts, phonemic awareness, phonics and language based reading
The Ooka Island Adventure ends with children reading at a 2.0 reading level.
85 leveled and sequenced Ooka Island books digitally embedded online
These books are also available in print to supplement the Ooka Island Adventure.
Progress reports and detailed dashboards available in real-time
Since the Ooka Island Adventure is connected online, the administrative, district, school, classroom and parent level can monitor every click of the mouse.
Adaptive learning
Each child goes through a unique learning path embedded with learning algorithms that guide the child through MacPhee’s reading matrix in the most effective way.
Currently available in English
    The Ooka Island Adventure can be translated into any other phonetically based language.

Here is a break down of the pricing..

 

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I think if they could work all the bugs out, that it would be a very nice program for kids to use. All things consider from other programs out there available they have pretty reasonable pricing. They are offering a Free 14 Day Trial for you to check it out too. Right now they are also offering a discount on new subscribers. You can save 30% by entering the code LAUNCHSPECIAL30

 

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You can also find Ooka Island on Twitter, and Facebook. Wish I could tell you more… here is what the other TOS Crew Members had to say about it.

 

*I was offered a membership in exchange for my honest review for being part of being the TOS CREW.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

How disappointing, I hope the company was eventually able to help you get it working!