Ka-wiiiz!

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

This is a line from Paper Mario, a game for the Nintendo 64.

I have had the merging of technology and education on the brain lately. My friend’s eight-year-old son doesn’t like reading so I invited him over to play Paper Mario on the condition that he had to read all the dialog. He read for almost an hour, until he had to go home. My mother was telling me about another friend whose kids wanted to watch TV all day, but Mom didn’t want to hear the noise. She made them watch the TV on closed caption and they learned to read like aces. Despite all the bad rap TV and video games get, despite how society pushes us to encourage kids to read books instead, I think these could be our biggest allies for teaching reading.

Anyways, I haven’t had much time to dedicate to this project recently, and not much motivation, either, since Little Girl hasn’t been too into it lately. However, in the last couple of days, she has taken to playing a bit again, and now she can play in quiz mode. Big Girl will sometimes play the quizzes, but on anything other than the “common words” category she is guessing, randomly clicking each picture in turn until she hears the answering “Correct!” Little Girl is NOT guessing. She navigates through quizzes of artwork, dinosaurs, trees, fish, and dog breeds like a champ, missing only one or two answers. Also, I am fairly certain that she recognizes some words, since occasionally the pictures for the quiz load before the sounds and by the time the computer reads the word her mouse is already hovering above the correct picture. Moreover, she now repeats the specific names of these items, even occasionally trying to use them in real life. “That’s a birch,” she told me recently, pointing to a pine tree. Well, maybe not…

I’m so proud of her, and starting to feel inspired to bust out some new cardsets. Stay tuned.

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