Peer Review

Starfall reading practices

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Reviewed:: Jun 26, 2010 by Teacher Education

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: Starfall.com is a free website developed to motivate children to read with phonics. This website presents a systematic phonics approach,that includes phonemic awareness practice. he site is made possible by the Polis-Schutz family who created bluemountain.com greeting cards. Additional resource and curriculum materials are available for purchase. The site targets beginning readers with practice and reinforcement in: letter recognition, word recognition, sentence completion, phonics, phonemic awareness and easy reader books.
Type of Material:: Drill and practice
Recommended Uses:: The activities on this website could be used by beginning readers to practice and reinforce their reading skills. Classroom and reading teachers would be able to use this program with individual and small groups of students and at computer centers. There are printouts available with each of the categories. Preservice and student teachers may use the site for reference and additional resource.
Technical Requirements:: To download some of the materials, Adobe Reader is needed. Flash Player (minimum Flash Player 4) is needed.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: The Starfall website presents a reading program that is designed to be fun, exciting, and to instill confidence in young children as they learn to read. The site develops and reinforces recognition of letters, sounds and words. The vowels are taught through animated songs. Easy reading books are available in a variety of genres. Printouts are available in each of the areas.
Target Student Population:: This website targets preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, special education, homeschool, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL) students.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: None

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:: The Starfall website presents information and activities that have valid and educationally significant concepts and skills for beginning readers. This learning object could provide information for teacher candidates in reading methods courses. The Starfall site provides practice in beginning reading skills: letter recognition, phonemic awareness, phonics and easy to read books. These core concepts are the building blocks for any student learning to read. The content is colorful, engaging and easy to navigate and is considered educationally significant.
Concerns:: This website does include links to the sale of materials and books in the Starfall's purchase reading program. It is an identified link, which gives the choice to access or not.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:: The Starfall reading program is designed to be fun and educational for young children as they learn to read. Teacher candidates in Early Childhood and Elementary Programs in higher education could use this website as a resource when they are teaching reading during their program practicums and student teaching. The activities could be used as a whole class lesson through the implementation of an interactive whiteboard. The teacher candidate could also incorporate selected activities as part of their center activities for all students or for student that need extra practice with reading concepts and skills. Teacher candidates could also use this website as a model to development fun and educational reading activities for beginning readers or for students with special needs in reading, such as for a student that has English as a second language.
Concerns:: The content presented on the Starfall site should be used as reinforcement and practice. The site should not be substituted for or replace teacher led instruction.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

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Strengths:: The website is easy to navigate. The links are developed for young children to be able to navigate and include lots of images. The buttons have easy to follow labels and/or images. Some of the directions are given through animation and also recorded by young children. There is a site map to assist instructors to navigate through the entire website.
Concerns:: None

Other Issues and Comments:: The Starfall site is free, but has supplemental materials for purchase. The supplemental materials were not available for review.
Creative Commons: