. . . Pond has a rural setting where friendly creatures invite
small children to test and develop their basic arithmetic using the numbers up to 10.
Some cheerful teddy bears . . . set up a picnic on the grass. Are there enough items of food
for them all?
. . . Ducks swim about the pond . . . How many are there of each colour? How many altogether?
The questions evolve naturally from the attractive images, and are asked and answered by speaking
voices as well as by writing on the screen.
. . . It's easy to move from game to game and to edit the configurations so that timings and
sound effects match the needs of individual players. This is a breath of fresh air in the sometimes
stuffy world of early years maths.
Extract from a review by Tom Deveson in The Guardian, Tuesday 20 March 2007 |
The schoolzone evaluation
Pond has four highly visual and interactive counting activities, aimed at early years and foundation
stage children. It allows children to practise counting numbers to ten, however, Pond does much
more than this. The activities also reinforce different skills, such as one to one correspondence
and how many more/fewer than. Instant feedback is provided for the pupil to try again if incorrect.
In each of the activities, pupils complete a pre-determined number of rounds (easily adjusted
using the teacher settings) and are then rewarded by a short animation of the characters from
the activity. All activities have an immediately attractive, child-friendly format and are perfectly
suited to being used with a whole class on an interactive whiteboard, or networked for use on
stand-alone PCs.
The children quickly learned how to use the different activities, using either the touch facility
of a whiteboard, a mouse, keyboard or a switch, according to the needs or preferences of the
children. Each activity can be easily tailored to the individual needs of the learner; the title
screen shows 6 buttons, each can be set up to run whichever activities the teacher requires and
also how they are used. With a selection of available settings (such as, number to count up to,
fading background) Pond easily allows for a good level of differentiation.
Pond is also compatible with the publishers Talk·2·Talk feature, which allows other languages
to be incorporated into the activity and then selected solely or spoken with another. Currently
available are French, Gujarati, Punjabi, Polish, Spanish, Urdu and Welsh in addition to English.
As a school with a significant number of EAL learners, this facility proved a wonderful bonus.
In one class, we used Gujarati and English together, which allowed for our Reception class to
hear numbers to ten in both English and Gujarati together and supported a newly arrived Gujarati
speaking pupil.
Pond quickly became one of the pupils' favourites and, with the available adjustments and the
use of the language feature, working with individuals and as a whole class was easy and fun.
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the full schoolzone evaluation |
