Perfect Practice Learning Blog

Three Learning Games You Should Have Got Your Kids for Christmas

Now you've had a month to watch your kids play the new video games you bought them. It's time to ask the question: are you content to sit back and let them spend hundreds of hours over the next year learning how to kill people? If not, there is another way!
Here are three outside-the-box learning games that can help you replace the mindless and destructive practice (pointless violence and hand-eye coordination exercises) kids get with most video games with "deliberate practice" that will help your children develop key talents or knowledge—and, yes, potentially change their lives.

The theme that connects all 3 of these games is intelligent practice: "perfect practice" of complex activities that will leave your kids stronger, smarter, more 'talented' than they were before they played. All five programs can be used to lead your children into hours of time spent with games that make you strong (*as opposed to games that leave your kids weaker (flabby, hunched over, dumber, more agrressive, less socially at ease) and less able (than if they hadn't played).

TALENT is NOT ENOUGH as you suspected or at least hoped. Deliberate practice, lots and lots of it, is the key to mastery in any field: sports, music, academics, arts. So the question we'll ask of each game (we review) is:
How does it get my kids to "fall in love with practice"--the right kind of practice (deliberate practice) so they'll do it, lot of it, on their own?

1. Soft Mozart Piano Trainer (learn to read music as early as age 4)

Not content to watch your kids grow up as passive consumers of sampled music stolen from real/creative musicians and grafted onto a machine-generated rhythm track (and sung by ... oh never mind)? You say you'd rather have your kids learn to play and read (and maybe compose) melodies?

Why would you want your kids to learn piano? Take your pick: it's fun, it will give them a greater appreciation of beauty, it's a keystone instrument that opens up the world of music--and makes it easier to learn other instruments; there's strong evidence (from the MIND institute at UC Irvine) that early piano instruction leads to very large jumps in mathematical reasoning ability.

So why don't more children play? The problem with traditional piano lessons is that most students don't practice, won't practice, hate practice. Even with a great teacher the burden is on the parents to motivate, cajole, nag their kids into doing their lessons. Add to that the complexity of musical notation--especially to parents who do not read music themselves--and you have the explanation for why so few children play an instrument. Soft Mozart takes care of both the complexity and the practice problems. With a music scale turned on its side and symbols representing Do-Re-Mi, etc. even four year olds (the developer, a conservoatory trained Russian woman whose mission in life is to teach all children to play music, says two-year-olds) are reading music their first lesson.

But will they practice once they learn? When my children started (at age 5 & 6) they would easily do 30-40 minutes a night each, without any nagging (now they've moved on to acoustic piano and read music very well, unlike their father). So if you want to make sure your children never ask you: "Why didn't you make me learn the piano?" now you won't have to.
Game includes: 5 different learning games, 52 songs, and note stickers.
Requires: MIDI compatible electronic keyboard and USB MIDI converter (you probably already have an electronic keyboard if you're interested in music; the MIDI converters are sold on the SoftMozart web site)
Full disclosure: I make nothing if you buy this software!
Looks like they have a special going on.
$175.00 (Regular $199) - Holiday Special
Ages 4- Adult (developer says 2 and it's true it's never too early to start so long as it's just fun)

2. TargetScore! Vocabulary (boost reading comprehension, academic performance, test-prep scores)

The research is clear: word power is reading power (or, in professor-speak: a child's vocabulary level is functionally equivalent to his reading comprehension level. If you increase vocabulary you increase reading comprehension. If you don't increase vocabulary, extra reading practice only leads to frustration.
The bad news is that we live in a video age that is not friendly to the activities that used to help kids build bigger academic vocabularies: reading, conversation with adults, writing. Many children, due to the influence of Television, lost family time due to commuting, two jobs,, etc. enter school thousands of words behind their classmates in vocabulary. This hidden handicap doesn't start to show up until third or fourth grade (when the vocabulary level of school books jumps) and by then student are well behind and schools are unequipped to help them catch up.

Our crazy, reading-unfriendly modern life (cell phones, busy schedules with little adults-child conversation time, iPods, Nintendo, TV, videos) affects all readers:... Even our best readers have trouble finding the time to read, converse, or write a note or story or journal entry.... are behind their grandparents generations in vocabulary and reading comprehension ability. The best thing you can do to keep your kids on, or above, grade level in reading is to boost their vocabulary; nothing else works: not assigning more reading, not vocabulary workbooks or word walls. But traditional approaches to boosting reading ignore vocabulary; and traditional approaches to teaching vocabulary have three flaws: one-size fits all word lists, not enough repetitions, not enough active interaction with words. TargetScore! Vocabulary solves all three problems.
Starter Disk includes: "Learning Zones" Vocabulary Placement game, Four game "Perfect practice" multimode learning path, TargetScore! Motivation & Mastery system so kids get the repetitions they need to put words in long-term memory, and one volume with 300 words customized to your child's vocabulary-reading level.
Full Disclosure: If I can find little wrong with the learning path and motivation features of this software it's because I spend years perfecting them in learning labs (yes, I helped create this software). Nothing's perfect, but this is as close as you get to perfect practice in vocabulary--and that's good news because traditional approaches to teaching vocabulary (workbooks, weekly quizzes, word walls, unsequenced vocabulary lists, one or two repetitions per word) have never been shown to accelerate vocabulary growth (which explains why schools get no gains in reading compehension after second grade-- vocabulary isn't keeping up with the books).
$79.95 - 3 Level Starter Disk (Includes: Vocabulary-Reading Diagnostic; Four-Game Learning Path;
300 Targeted Vocabulary Words)
Ages: 7-Adult (Reading Grade Levels 3-2nd Year College)

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