Re: Software for preschoolers?

[adric22@yahoo.com]

I noticed "Create with Garfield" listed by somebody in a post above
mine.  I have that for my Commodore 64 and my daughter likes to play
with that one.

But the main thing my daughter likes to do (On my Commodore 64) is
type.  Yep.  This sounds strange.  She is 3 years and 3 months..  So
barely over 3 years.  She has been learning her ABC's at daycare.  I've
been working with her for 4 months trying to help her write letters
with a dry-erase pen in this special learning book where they can trace
the letters.  She still can't do it.  She doesn't have the fine motor
skills in her hands and fingers yet.  But she can tell me what letters
are by looking at flash-cards.  One day she asked to type on my
Commodore 64.  So, I let her.  She learned how to use the arrow keys
(unlike an Apple II, where in BASIC you can't easily cursor around the
screen) and the backspace key.  She did this for a few days in a row.
Then she said "I'm going to type my name."  I said, "okay, type your
name."  And she did it!  Well, almost.  So I started helping her with
this and making daily typing sessions with her.  In the last week she
has learned to type her name perfectly, on her own, and type Cookie and
Cat, and a few others.  It occurred to me that typing is actully easier
for a toddler to learn than writing.  It requires less motor skills and
only requires that they recognize the letter, they don't have to be
able to form it from memory.

The Commodore 64 (and probably the Applie II) Are both good machines
for doing this.  They have large text (40 columns) and they just boot
right up to a screen where they can start typing.  There aren't other
things on the screen to distract them (like icons and mouse pointers
and stuff inside a word-processor) and the key-repeat rate is ZERO on
my C64 except for space-bar.  When I let her type on my Windows XP
machine she holds the keys down too long and types from 2 to 5 of the
same letter, which confuses her.

I'm going to keep up the typing lessons.  I suspect by the time she
gets into kindergarten, she'll be able to type as well as she speaks.
And all thanks to my 20 year old 8-bit computer.