Great Games and accessories for all Consoles from Gamesbuyer.

Great Games and Accessories for the PC.Learning Ladder Years 1 and 2 is an extremely good CD-ROM aimed at children aged 5-7. It presents a huge number of activities that would help to support the school curriculum.

Children can navigate their way around the playroom, which will develop their confidence with the mouse. Children will enjoy making things move on the screen. There is also a range of fun activities, such as painting and copying the tune.

The program also helps to consolidate and reinforce what children are learning in literacy, numeracy and science at school. There are games involving identifying sounds, making words, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and much more. Children are rewarded with stickers as they complete activities correctly, which they will love collecting and putting in their own sticker book. --Amanda York

Dorling Kindersley has produced yet another outstanding and completely new interactive learning system-- My First CD-ROM: Getting Ready For School--to help children develop key pre-school skills while providing parents with advice and information on child development. It has been written in consultation with Sue Robson, a renowned early years' teacher, educational consultant and author, who is a senior lecturer at the Roehampton Institute.

Meet Zack, a Jack-in-the-box and friendly on-screen guide whose aim is to make learning fun. Hear his clear explanations and animated instructions on how to play the six easy games. Each one can be adapted to suit your child's level of understanding and their fine motor skills. For example, choices can be made between using the mouse or the keyboard, or selecting different speeds or levels of difficulty, choosing between hearing letters as phonetic sounds or as names, and so on. This flexibility enables games to be adapted over and over again as your child's skills develop, so building and developing a child's confidence.

The package is designed for 3-5 year-olds, under parental supervision, or for slightly older children to use on their own. Progress can be monitored and difficulty levels can be adjusted according to age and ability. The games aim to acquaint and help children with the key topics covered in the first year at school, and include number recognition, logic, counting, mathematical language, shapes and sizes, spatial awareness, speaking and listening, letter recognition and letter sounds. Work sheets can be printed out which can extend learning beyond the PC. Buy this package for your youngster, and lay firm foundations with its highly effective approach to parent-assisted learning. --Susan Naylor

Great Games and accessories for all Consoles from Gamesbuyer.

Learning Ladder Year 6 is another excellent CD-ROM from Dorling Kindersley. It's aimed at children aged 10-11 and structured so that children listen to a lesson and then carry out exercises that help to consolidate the literacy and numeracy they are learning as part of the school curriculum. This CD-ROM would be invaluable for any child in Year 6 who is preparing for their SATs.

Exercises can be done at five different levels of difficulty, so that children are challenged and continue to make progress. For every 400 points that a child scores, they are rewarded with new pictures to use with the printing machine. As they gather more pictures they can enjoy designing their own cards, invitations and labels, which can be printed out.

Children can also have lots of fun navigating around Science City and learning lots of facts along the way. For example, they can find out about animals, food chains and gravity. The progress tracker clearly shows how each child is getting on with a system of green and red lights. This would quickly show parents where more help is needed. --Amanda York

Great Games and Accessories for the PC.Explore the ancient civilisations of Greece, Atlantis, Egypt and the Aztecs, all while building and reinforcing essential maths skills through fun and challenging games in I Love Maths!. A couple of kids named Gretchen and Wilbur have travelled back in time and are causing trouble. By using their knowledge of maths, kids can reinforce what they've learned in school and foil the dastardly duo's plot to terrorise the ancient world.

Players can choose from three games: "Save the World", "Free Travel" and "Challenge". In "Save the World", kids visit each civilisation while bending their brains with multilevel, mind-boggling maths games. In Greece, they can free the country's greatest athletes by playing the Measurement Olympics; although tricky at first, this activity is a great way to learn to recognise types of measurements. Players take the Time Machine to Atlantis to help Ratty the plumber fix broken water pipes (and restore the city) by practising fractions. There is even trouble with paradise--birds of paradise, that is. The Aztecs need kids' geometry skills to free their beautiful birds of paradise that are locked inside the temple.

The "Free Travel" mode allows players to explore the civilisation of their choice for unstructured play, and the Challenge area includes a multitude of multilevel maths practice questions that test a child's understanding of angles, area, length, money, perimeter, quadrilaterals, symmetry and more.

I Love Maths! covers more than 250 maths topics and contains 3,000 maths problems and 2 million arithmetic questions. Do the maths and you will discover that this software is a great value. It also scores high on the replay factor, so you are sure to get your money's worth. And the more than 6,000 helpful pop-ups make this program excellent for independent play. Parents and teachers can easily track a child's progress, making this software ideal for use at home, in-home schooling or in schools. An "intelligent tracking system" self-adjusts to individual maths abilities by topic, although the levels on any of the games can be changed manually. (Ages 7 to 11) --Tina Velgos

Great Games and accessories for all Consoles from Gamesbuyer.

Great Games and Accessories for the PC.Learning Ladder Year 4 is a fantastic CD-ROM aimed at Year 4 children. It is structured so that children listen to a lesson and then carry out exercises that help to consolidate the literacy and numeracy they are learning as part of the school curriculum.

Exercises can be done at five different levels of difficulty, so that children are challenged and continue to make progress. For every 400 points that a child scores, they are rewarded with new pictures to use with the printing machine. As they gather more pictures they can enjoy making their own cards, invitations and labels, which can be printed out.

Children can also have lots of fun navigating around Science City and learning lots of facts along the way. For example, they can have a go at the science quiz and find out about roots, leaves and flowers. The progress tracker clearly shows how each child is getting on with a system of green and red lights. This would quickly show parents where more help is needed. --Amanda York