Novell Announces Make a Story for Kids

Consumer Division Broadens Reading Education Series

ATLANTA--April 24, 1995--Novell, Inc. today announced Make A Story, a home education title for the development of pre-reading skills that will begin shipping in June. Another early reading title, Read-A-Rama, will ship simultaneously to complete the early reading series within the PerfectHome line. The addition of these two new titles positions Novell's consumer division as a premier provider of children's educational software. PerfectHome is the newly renamed WordPerfect Main Street line.

The award-winning Read With Me software title along with Make A Story and Read-A-Rama create a complete multimedia reading series on CD-ROM.

Make A Story uses story creation to teach children about letter sounds. These sounds, known as phonemes, are the building blocks of words. For example, "cat" is made up of three sounds--/k/, /a/ and /t/. As children learn that words are made up of smaller sounds, their reading proficiency increases. The best predictors of first-grade reading achievement are letter recognition and the ability to discriminate between phonemes.

"We've created a complete reading education series with our education partner, the Waterford Institute. These products provide a pathway to reading for children ages 3 to 7," said Dan Rask, product marketing director, Novell Consumer Division. "With Make A Story, Read with Me and Read-A-Rama, children start by learning to recognize letters and progress to reading words and stories. This is multimedia learning technology at its best."

Make A Story consists of six fun activities that incorporate rhyming, letter sounds and story building. The colorful graphics appeal to young children and a "talking" interface enables pre-readers to learn on their own without constant parent supervision.

Once they have finished creating a story, children can choose to have the story read to them, save the story, print the story or build the story again and add a new twist. Make A Story supports color printing and requires no cutting or pasting to create a story booklet.

The six activities include Choose a Rhyme, Make it Rhyme, Choose a Sound, Right Sound, Put it Together and Choose a Friend. Children are given the beginning of the story and then allowed to select the elements to continue and complete the story.

In Choose a Rhyme and Make it Rhyme, children learn about rhyming while creating, seeing and hearing their stories. They can choose from different rhyming passages in Choose a Rhyme or find the one rhyming option in Make it Rhyme. The ten different story options include elements from popular nursery rhymes, including This Little Pig, Little Miss Muffet, and Hey, Diddle Diddle.

Choose a Sound and Right Sound reinforce letter sounds and help children associate letters with their sounds. Within each story, all elements start with the same letter sound and as the story is told, the computer emphasizes the first-letter sound. Ten different story themes include Wee Willie Winkee and Long Lewie.

Put It Together emphasizes how words go together to form sentences. In this activity, kids create their own sandwich, ski outfit, monster, ice cream sundae or dinosaur -- more than 12 story options are included.

In Choose a Friend, children use story-building skills acquired in Put It Together to build an interesting story with a plot and characters. Children can choose a story situation and a friend to share the story with. Children may choose from The First Day at School, Going Camping or a number of other fun stories.

Make A Story was developed for Novell PerfectHome by the Waterford Institute, a nonprofit research center specializing in multimedia education software for children.

Product design teams are led by experienced teachers and include instructional designers and educators. New programs are tested extensively for educational value and appeal by the Waterford School's 750 children in classroom and home settings. Waterford has operated computer learning systems in more than 40 inner-city schools in New York City and elsewhere.

System Requirements and Pricing

Make A Story will be available for Windows and requires a 486SX processor, 4MB RAM (8MB recommended), 1MB hard disk space, Windows 3.1 or higher, a double-speed CD-ROM drive, 256-color video display, mouse and MPC2-compatible sound card and speakers.

Make A Story will be available in June for the suggested retail price of $49.95 through software retailers, superstores, warehouse clubs or directly from Novell, Inc. at (800) 451-5151.

Novell PerfectHome consumer software will continue to make computers more practical and computing more pervasive with a wide range of titles in the areas of personal productivity, family entertainment and home education.