Screenshot from Going to the Park

Talking Stories are just what it says on the pack – stories that talk: a picture with text below it and the words on screen which can be read out loud. Unlike CDs sold for home use with rich graphics and lots of animations, these stories are relatively sparse visually. The benefit of simple graphics is that screens come up quickly no matter how old the computer and the pictures don’t dominate the words. Difficult words in the text of each story are highlighted in red. When clicked on you hear an explanation of the word.

There are five stories in all. The striking thing about each of the stories is just how different they are from one another. Each one has a different look, completely different content and even the narrators’ voices are different. The story titles themselves demonstrate the range of subject matter: The Great Fire of London, Sally’s Trip to the Seaside, A Trip Down the River Thames, Visiting the Market and Going to the Park.

While the story titles are different, the key learning methodology is the same: introduce a wide variety of subjects within the context of the story. Then children make choices or do an activity to move the story forward. In some stories the outcome of the story changes as a result of the child’s earlier choices. The range of topics covered for key stage 1 children is very wide: history, numeracy, geography, mapping, controls and, of course, literacy. As a bonus, each story can be heard in another nine community languages.

There are a lot of hidden extras that children will really appreciate. “Going to the Park”, for example, is a poem and the “extras” enjoying the park are characters from the other stories. Overall, children will want to move through the stories just to see what is new and learning will happen naturally.