Making Sense with Letters

Making Sense with Letters is designed for pre-school and pre-literacy use, to help develop visual perception, memory and language skills.

There are 9 different activities, some requiring auditory perception as well as visual perception.

Rewards take the form of a picture of the completed word, together with speech.

The 'Options' window allows you to set the difficulty level, use of sound and which word lists are to be used.

A separate program called Making Sense with Letters Editor allows the standard word lists to be edited and rearranged. It also allows new word lists to be created.

If you have an IntelliKeys keyboard, the standard keyboard overlays can be used to operate the program.

The activities:

Alphabet game - Press a letter on the keyboard. The letter appears on the screen as upper and lower case, accompanied by a picture of something that uses the chosen letter as its initial.

Copy the word - A word is shown on the screen in grey. The letters must be copied to fill the boxes below. When the word is complete a picture of the word is shown and the word is spoken.

Listen - type the letter - A picture is shown on the screen. The word is completed by listening to and copying each letter of the word. When the word is complete the word is spoken.

Initial letter - Find the correct initial letter for a picture. Click on the picture to hear it spoken.

Rebus - Complete a word by finding the initial letters of the pictures shown in place of the letters.

Type the missing letter - Work out what the missing letters are to spell the word shown as a picture.

Listen - type the word - Spell a word by listening to it being spoken.

Unscramble the word - Complete the word by unscrambling the letters shown in grey. No aural or visual clues to the word are given.

Letter hunt - Find the corresponding letters on the keyboard as they appear on the conveyor belt. When a correct match is made the letter disappears. Crank the handle on the 'letter machine' to make the letters appear more quickly! If a letter drops off the conveyor belt the game is over and the points are awarded.

New pictures or sound can be added from your hard disc by using the 'get' buttons. Words can be added, changed or deleted by using the buttons at the bottom of the screen.

There are six word lists to choose from. These word lists can be used however you like to group sets of words. The lists are arranged by difficulty level, so list 1 is the easiest while list 6 is the hardest. You can restrict the words shown and you can combine word lists.