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Review of Blue's Reading Time Activities

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"No mom, you've got to do it this way." said my four and a half year old, "C'mon, we've got to make more newspapers." Clearly he knew what he was doing, and he was very excited about it. Up until now, his only experience with newspapers was bringing them upstairs for me in the morning and listening while I read him the comics. Now he was making his own newspaper, the Big News Gazette.

The plot of this interactive adventure is that Cash Register is out of newspapers. It is up to your child to help Blue and her friends fill up the newsstand with more papers. It takes five articles to make a paper and five papers to earn a puzzle piece for Blue's Word Cube. When your child makes forty five newspapers, he or she will have enough pieces to complete the Word Cube. So junior reporters, your work is cut out for you.

Here are the things that need to be done. Help Dot get the Dictionary in order by matching words to pictures. Assist Blue in interviewing Purple Kangaroo, Green Kitten, and Periwinkle. Help them finish their stories by answering questions.

Mailbox needs you to get the details for neighborhood news stories. To do this you need to meet Sarge Ant and his troops. You will learn about and collect "powerful" words (verbs) to complete the stories. Two of those powerful words are "walk" and "turn", very important things for an ant army. Choose your team in the Word Match Card Game tournament. It doesn't matter who wins, it's still a great story to add to the Gazette.

Uh oh, all of Fan's words have blown away. When you see a red word card, collect it. Then you can use these to make your own story which Fan will read to you when you are done.

When you finish articles, you can choose whether or not to add them to the current issue of the Gazette. If your story is a keeper, you'll take it to the Layout Table where you can choose the order of your stories. When the newspaper is complete, take it back to the newsstand.

Children may work at their own pace since games are automatically saved. There is a sign in screen, so several children can use the program. The game is not reading dependent which makes it a perfect choice for the targeted age group of 3 to 6.

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