Starfall: Teaching Through Song and Games (Guest Blogger!)

This is a guest blog post from my epal Genesis in Guatemala. Her blog is fabulous and I have been following her for a few years now. We have yet to skype, but this was a good solution since she is always on her computer in the middle of the night.


I never intended for my kids to start school so early, but when my oldest, Dorian, was 2.5 years old, he was fascinated with the computer. I did a little searching to find some kid-friendly sites and Starfall.com was one of the first that I came across and Dorian loved it!
It didn’t take him long to master the mouse movements necessary to play his favorite songs and I would let him play on the laptop while I worked on my desktop in the mornings. His baby brother, Dante, would climb up beside him and hum along to the songs. Pretty soon, both of them could belt out most of the tunes on the alphabet section of the site.
When Dorian was 3, he really wanted to learn to read. He would offer to read the bedtime story, then say, in a rather angry tone, “Oh, right, I can’t, because I can’t READ yet!” Obviously, he was ready!
I started with teaching him the letter sounds . . . but it turned out he already knew most of them, thanks to Starfall. What he lacked was the knowledge to put the sounds together so he could actually read a sentence. It was pretty easy to teach him to read, because he already had the basics down, just from playing online! He’s already well on his way to a Grade One reading level (he’s 5) and his brother Dante (4) is close behind him, all thanks to their time on the computer.