Hire your child a personal tutor on CD
The time of the ritual revision books families used to take on holiday is gone. Nowadays, children pack a pile of CD-Roms, hoping their friends on the other side of the world have the hardware to run them.
When it comes to choosing which titles to pack, Microsoft's My Personal Tutor is a good pick. The personalised learning software has two versions. Pre-school is designed for kids aged three to five, and teaches skills such as counting and quantities, colours and shapes.
Primary school Years One and Two aim to familiarise children aged five to seven with maths and reading skills.
Taking these titles with you is almost like hiring a personal tutor, except you do not have to pay his air fare. Plus, the tuition fee is reasonable: $429 for each title. The title each contains two CDs.
What makes My Personal Tutor practical and innovative is its TutorAssist learning technology, which assesses your child's progress, senses when he or she is encountering difficulties, adjusts the teaching level and reinforces instructions when needed.
In My Personal Tutor, your virtual professor, Professor Presto, is here to explain the concepts behind tricky problems.
There also is an integrated progress report where parents can track children's progress across both titles, and all four CDs.
So you are thinking of leisurely, quiet afternoons on the beach while the kids get instruction in front of the computer at home? This is where parents have to be vigilant. While the activities of My Personal Tutor are well designed and contain the appropriate progressive level of difficulty, the right alternation of fun and serious, and enough suspense to keep the child's concentration high, it is still possible for a child to succeed in some activities without really understanding what he or she is doing.
A virtual teacher, yes, but not without parental supervision.
The other trap of educational CD-Roms (particularly globally distributed titles from firms such as Microsoft) is that they provide a pre-formatted, uniform type of education: children the world over are at risk of getting the same culture, pre-conceived ideas and references, not to mention speaking English with the same accent.
Fortunately, My Personal Tutor avoids that particular pitfall. The characters - all gingerly designed - speak with different accents and are referenced to different countries and cultures.
Some songs are even sung in their original language. The activities also introduce children to various cultures, from the South African Zulus to the Mexican Mariachis.
