New Literacy Aid for young and Special Needs Learners

A natural progression from the popular First Keys software, First Keys 2 enables early and special needs learners to acquire literacy skills through keyboard awareness. Widgit Software, already well known for publishing Writing With Symbols 2000, has developed this new program with Logotron to work equally well in Special Educational Needs and Mainstream environments.

"First Keys 2 has loads of extra features, especially in the graphics-handling area, that make it a really valuable early literacy and spelling tool for parents and teachers to help their children," explained Tina Detheridge, co-founder of Widgit Software.

Interactive White-board friendly, this useful tool can be used to support the literacy strategy First Keys 2 encourages children to develop keyboard skills through a structured approach to word level work. Activities include: text matching, spelling, cloze procedures and word and letter blends; and optional visual prompts can give individual levels of support to learners of differing abilities. Pupils can also choose to use the comprehensive set of ready-made activities, or make their own using an extensive range of colourful graphics.

The images provided include improved versions of the graphics in First Keys as well as photographs and additional material to illustrate new activity possibilities. It is easy for users to add their own images and photos and the program accepts a wide range of file formats. They might even use pictures from their Reading Scheme to support related texts.

Interactive Whiteboard-friendly, First Keys 2 can be used to support the literacy strategy. It is also possible to use a series of activities so that the student can extend their learning. For example: a task may be set to first 'match the text' then followed immediately with 'build the text'.

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