"A
rich resource of learning activities with a considerable range
of
imaginative and well structured tasks" Evaluation by BECTA (British Educational Communications and
Technology Agency)

"The
best piece of IT support I've used for children with literacy
problems"Lynne Sefton, LS Teacher, UK

"My son played these games spontaneously"London Parents Guide Review

"Wordshark
is my most effective teaching aid"C. Best, Dyslexia Teacher, Special Needs, London

"Wordshark is worth every penny"Anne Parker, NOTTS DA Newsletter

"This
brilliant program teachers phonics for spelling and reading in
a fun way.....
It is a program no school and parent should be without"Jan Poustie, Editor, Solutions

"The
program is used extensively for pupils with various learning
difficulties" Teresa Zbyszewska, The British School, Brussels

"Excellent
program for reading and spelling"British Dyslexia Foundation

Numbershark

REVIEW
IN PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD-
April1998 By Debbie Davies

"If
your memory of maths lessons ranks akin to being eaten alive by
a shark, try this CD tutor. White
Space has a formidable reputation with primary school teachers,
many of whom already use Wordshark, the company's literacy programme.
Now the company has launched Numbershark to teach numeracy to
children aged six and over. It may have similar objectives to
the government for teaching maths, but Numbershark's approach
is quite different. Education ministers remain tentative, hoping
that children will be able to cope with maths in adulthood. But
Numbershark wants children to conquer their difficulties so
they can positively enjoy maths.

There
are 30 games (newest release has 50 games), each finely graded . Some add meaning and understanding
to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Others allow
you to practise what you know. All teach fluency in mental arithmetic.
It is at its best with tricky concepts like swapping tens for units,
or understanding that one of the numbers in a multiplication or
division equation stands for a number of groups rather than a number
of objects.
Numbershark's graphics are a surprise to those used to US west coast-style
animation. The mix of stick men and silhouette shapes could hardly
be more basic but they communicate with children as effectively
as the simple graphics which Bandai uses on its virtual-pet screens.
In testing, our six- and eight-year-old children loved the games.
Older children realised for the first time that adding or taking
away nine is easier if you use ten instead and then recalculate
one up or down. As with Kumon maths, there is plenty on the value
of numbers. Games make you instinctive about where, on a board of
numbers up to 1,000 or more, one would place a figure.
As the price tag suggests, the content of the program is vast, and
the incremental steps for each game are kept as small as possible
so that the maths is never too difficult: as soon as we set
problems which were too tricky for our testers, they disliked the
program. The onus is on the parent to log their child in and oversee
their choice of games and the level at which they play. For parents
prepared to take the time, Numbershark promises to make pocket calculators
almost redundant."