Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #558 in Software
• Brand: Avanquest Software
• Released on: 2000-06-18
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 95

Amazon.co.uk Review
Learning Ladder Year 3 is another excellent product from Dorling Kindersley. This CD-ROM is packed with a good range of activities tailored to support the Year 3 school curriculum. Children can navigate their way around the playroom, looking for fun activities. These include the printing machine, which they can use to create their own labels, invitations and cards.

Children can then improve their literacy, numeracy and science skills by undertaking a wide range of activities that help to consolidate Year 3 work. Children can, for example, choose correct word endings, solve addition and subtraction problems, label skeletons and identify correct habitats for animals. These are just a few of the carefully thought out and clearly explained activities here.

Children should be able to use this program independently. They are rewarded with stickers for each activity they complete correctly and will enjoy collecting these and putting them in their own sticker album.

Learning Ladder Year 3 would be an excellent buy for any Year 3 child. It consolidates the learning that is taking place at school and develops children's competence on the computer. --Amanda York

Manufacturer's Description
Highly motivating and devised to support the teaching of literacy and numeracy in schools, learning ladder forms a complete learning system for your child. This disk covers the vital school subjects of reading, writing, maths and the world around us, to give your child a head start at school. Woody the pencil guides children through the playroom, encouraging and motivating children through hundreds of activities and fun exercises. The program teaches phonetics, spelling, writing words and building sentences. It also teaches addition and subtraction, division and multiplication. The progress chart monitors each of the activities and allows you to assess your child's strengths and weaknesses.

Customer Reviews

Another Great Title From the DK Stable
This is a great way to get reluctant scholars to apply themselves to Maths and English. There are also modules on telling the time, nature and geography. The work modules are first class and are of the high standard that we have come to expect from Dorling Kindersley. However there are a couple of negatives that stop me from awarding this five stars: firstly the interface is cumbersome - on completion of a task for the first time, children are rewarded with a sticker for their digital sticker book. However, moving from the work area to the sticker book and back to the work area is time consuming and unnecessarily complicated (you can save several sticers to stick in at the end, but children like to see the results of their hard work at the time). Secondly, you have to listen to every sound clip and there does not appear to be a way to "double-click" through it. Having said that, children are less likely to be put off by this and they will be more tolerant of the grating voice of the "host" - a talking pencil called Dash Scribble. However, when you get down to the Maths and English modules the units are well thought out and offer a fun alternative to homework - my eight year old son will often choose to do Learning Ladder over more conventional maths homework. All in all, this is great value for money and complements school work perfectly. So, if you can set aside the adult gripes about the interface, I can heartily recommend it to anyone with a child in, or about to go into Year 3, anywhere in the world.

Perfect distraction
Finally, something educational that distracted my son from his xbox. He sat for 2 hours using this software and was totally engrossed. He loved the sticker rewards, just like so many sticker books stacked on his bedroom shelf. He came away with a great sense of achievment. Apart from being a fun way to learn, it is a postive experience and is helping my son's confidence.
I'm off to buy Year 4

Fantastic fun while learning.
I bought this software to help give my dyslexic 7 year old a little confidence during the summer holidays. Not only has she enjoyed it but my other, younger kids also enjoyed playing with it, as have several of the neighbours kids. They all think its fun and not like learning at all (?)