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Interactive Reading Journey is an ambitious program designed to teach reading through "the development of phonemic awareness, letter sounds, word families and sight words in a purposeful, contextual fashion." Or so said one of our teacher reviewers! What does that mean? It means that if you looking for a systematic, phonics-based reading program for your child, this is it.

This entry in the Reader Rabbit series takes our character down the reading path through "Letter Land," a path littered with a series of sequenced storybooks of the genre familiar to those of us schooled before the advent of whole language programs. ("I see. I see Sam. Look, Sam! Look!") In addition to the basic reader books, the user must work through "skill house" games that teach basic encoding and decoding techniques (m + at = mat, h + at = hat).

Interactive Reading Journey follows a controlled vocabulary approach to beginning reading instruction (i.e. there is a finite set of words used in each book, each used in a progression, with repetition). While favored by many phonics proponents, it is unlikely to be appealing to a whole language purist. Our view is that different children learn in different ways. With some, phonics is the superior approach, with others, whole language may be more successful. But in either case, a child's ability to read well ultimately will benefit from the decoding skills this program teaches.

The program is purposely designed for school use in K-2 as well as at home use. Although our more experienced teacher reviewers felt that Interactive Reading Journey contained "excellent" educational material, they felt it unlikely they they would consider building their reading curriculum around a software package. One thought it had excellent potential for home-schooling a beginning reader. Our parent reviewers agreed that this program was excellent for truly teaching youngsters to read.

Interactive Reading Journey is a strong education title, and is lighter on entertainment content than most comparable products. We tried it out with kids 4, 6, and 8 years-old, and none of them were as captivated by this program as they were by some more arcade-like programs. "I liked it at first because I liked the other Reader Rabbit's," said our 6 year-old. "But this one was boring." Our 8 year-old said, "I didn't see much point in the books. We don't read 'Look, Look' books in school. There are more interesting books than that." This program does not appear to be a good babysitter surrogate -- but that really is not its intent.

Installation was simple on both the PC and the Mac. Both parents and kids found using the program intuitive, although the older children were frustrated by the structured pace of the program.

Interactive Reading Journey is appropriate for a typical kindergartner. Advanced pre-schoolers would benefit, as would slower 2nd and perhaps remedial 3rd graders.

If you want a highly structured, phonics-based program, you've found it! But if you are looking for something the kids will go off and work on by themselves for an hour after dinner every night, you will probably be disappointed.

See SuperKids' comparisons with other learn to read software titles, and the Buyers Guide for current market prices of the PC and Mac versions.

PC: Win 95/98/Me, Pentium 90 or faster cpu, 45MB hard drive space, 16MB RAM, 256 color display, 4x or faster CD-ROM, Windows-compliant sound card .

Mac: System 7.5 or later, 45MB hard drive space, 16MB RAM, 256 color or better display, 4x or faster CD-ROM, Sound Blaster compatible sound card .

Reviewed on:
-     Pentium 90 running Windows 98, with 64MB RAM and 4x - CD-ROM

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