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The Web for Kindergartners

By Richard A Milewski Over the last year and a half, I’ve been working on a project called Curiosity Clubhouse that uses computers, both in the classroom and at home, to help kindergarten students learn. It’s a web-based system that uses a collection of flash-based learning activities to help kids learn their letters and numbers and get started learning to read.

It came about after some conversations with an extraordinary kindergarten teacher named Barbara Brisson. One of the most technology-savvy teachers I’ve ever encountered, she was able to put her finger on a number of issues that limited the utility of computers in the kindergarten classroom.

Not the least of these is that the address bar in the browser is very hard for non-readers to use. And think about how to build a login page for someone who doesn't yet know the alphabet.

Curiosity Clubhouse, our experiment in the web for pre-readers has solved many these problems and added additional capabilities that have resulted in improved end-of-year reading and math scores for Barbara’s kindergartners.

For more information on the Curiosity Clubhouse project follow the Related Link