Bailey's Book House

Review this program's Universal Design for Learning features in the Examples and Illiustrations area.
Visit the publisher's Web site: http://www.learningneeds.com (Edmark software is owned and published by Riverdeep Interactive Learning.)

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Bailey's Book House is Edmark Corporation's highly acclaimed pre-reading program. Designed for preschool to second-grade students, Bailey's Book House combines interactive technology with a unique set of proven learning techniques to create an environment that introduces a wide range of early literacy concepts. The software exposes children to such reading fundamentals as word identification, vocabulary, sound-symbol association, left-to-right tracking, and part-to-whole recognition--all within the playful neighborhood of lovable cat Bailey and his friends.

Product Highlights

The software's characters invite children to explore the sounds and meanings of letters, words, rhymes, and stories. Via five different activities, students acquire vocabulary and build communication skills as they design greeting cards, write stories, create zany Mother Goose rhymes, learn word relationships, and play alphabet games with dancing dinosaurs and jogging jaguars.

In addition to its varied, engaging activities, Bailey's Book House supports students with a variety of reading abilities. Special features include:

• Read-aloud text: Every word on the screen is read aloud, and students can have words or sentences repeated by clicking with the mouse.
• Highlighting: Each word in a sentence is highlighted as it is read aloud.

With its two different learning modes, Bailey's Book House also encourages two important thinking skills--divergent and convergent thinking:

• Explore and Discover Mode: Children move through activities at their own pace, which promotes creativity and invention.
• Question and Answer Mode: Characters ask children to answer questions or perform a task, activities that promote problem solving and logical analysis.

Finally, Bailey's Book House provides support for teachers and parents with its on-screen Adult Notebook. The notebook provides information about Bailey's Book House, and gives classroom and home activities that reinforce the skills children learn while using the software.

Disclaimer

CAST does not necessarily endorse this product or consider it fully universally designed. CAST applauds the inclusion of universally designed features in this product and wishes to illustrate some of those features for educational purposes.