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DS Games for Pre-readers?
ProfJonathan writes "My daughter just got a DS from the grandparents for her 6th birthday. She's only beginning to read, but wants a bunch of games of her own rather than just playing her older brothers' games. She got Nintendogs with the DS, so that's taken care of, but other relatives are asking what she might want. Can anyone recommend some good DS games that don't require reading skill, that might be age-appropriate and interesting for a 1st grade girl?" Wouldn't it be creepy if the kid had a really good brain age?
Here are a few.
Diddy Kong Racing
Yoshi's Island
Super Princess Peach
Kirby Squeak Squad
Lego Star Wars
Strawberry Shortcake
Smart Girls Playhouse
I know my 4 year old son loves Mario Kart. Lego Star Wars is his other favorite. That has a lot to do with how much he likes the films also. So if your child isn't familiar with the movies, or doesn't care for them, it would make a big difference of course.
Based on my own daughters - I would also recommend Animal Crossing. Now this involves reading, but that's not bad. It's really going to encourage and motivate her so that she can play. The ideas are pretty much what you get with the whole webkinz rage - and I know my 6 year old and 7 year old girls are totally into that. There so many more ds titles she would probably really enjoy it isn't even funny. Barbie stuff, Disney Princess stuff, etc.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Get the R4 adapter and a microSD card, and put Colors! on it. Look what others have made.
She is 6 and cannot read? I would focus on that part first before letting her play games.
Disney Princess: Magical Jewels is another good one, if she's in to the whole Princess craze.
New York Times Crosswords.
Why not make this a good opportunity to teach her how to read -- you're never too young to learn. If she encounters something she can't read, read it for her, or you can sit next to her as she plays the game. It's a great way to get kids to read without making them feel like it's a chore. The animation of the scenarios can help her understand what she's reading too.
To answer your question, I believe the new Super Mario would be a good choice.
Umm, I have a few friends with a 2-1/2 and 3 year olds. They're already starting to teach their kids to read. You may want to focus on that instead of giving her games. Buy her some books. Let her play the DS after spending 30-60 minutes of time a day working on reading.
I'm surprised that she's only beginning to read at age 6. Myself and most of my friends were reading Hardy Boys books at that age. My son just turned 3 now, and he's quite able to read Berenstein Bears and similar books by himself. My nephew is 5, and he just finished his first Goosebumps book.
It's too late to rectify the situation now, but your daughter probably should have started to read when she was two or three years old. By the time she's six, she should be quite able to read newspapers, magazines, and novels the size of the Hardy Boys books.
You should get her involved in a local library group for children, where they read actual books. Some of these programs reward children for the more books that they read, which provides the incentive necessary for some children. Of course, many children just end up reading because they enjoy it.
Yes, the original trilogy was complete crap. Buggy nearly to the point of being unplayable. The new Lego Star Wars - Complete Saga for the DS was done from scratch by another developer and is much better. I can also throw in a hearty recommendation for Clubhouse games!
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
You've left me wondering why you want recommendations of games that don't involve reading. Six years old is hardly too young to be learning how to read. If anything, you want games that will help teach reading. So what you really want is a game that has reading in it, but can still be understood even by a gamer who isn't a good reader yet. There are many games that fit that bill. As a suggestion, check out Meteos. It's a really great puzzle game with five different levels of difficulty (so she'll be able to win it at least on the lowest level), and after completing the campaign mode, there are a multitude of all-text epilogues explaining how your victory (or lack thereof) in the final level affected events. That's a great way to practice reading. You can sit down with her and read it for her when she's playing; it'll be a good lesson, and she'll be interested because she'll want to know how the game ended up.
Incidentally, I first learned the word "Congratulations" when it popped up at the end of a particularly hard Game Boy game I had been playing for a long while (this was when I was really young). I asked my dad what it said. After that, I was more proud of being able to read such a long word than at having beaten the game.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Give her games with real text. Those old Monkey Island games taught me English. Was quite fun the next year when we started learning English in school. When most pupils could say "This is a book", I used words as "rubberchicken with a pulley in the middle". You could actually install ScummVM and run Monkey Island on the DS :)
Also, in light of the recent controversy at Gamespot, this is a good site for truly independent reviews (although it can take a while for new games to show up). You can see what one game publisher did after he gave a bad review.
I recommend Oregon Trail. How else will a child learn the words Typhoid and Cholera?
The DS has a built in rechargeable, which is the fatal flaw in your cruel plan.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
Better to have her learn at a young age the difference between reasonable, and unreasonable, demands. Fail here, and you'll pay an ever more expensive price each year for decades to come.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is a really good "game" for a younger (starting from three), I let my son play with it. It doesn't focus on 'winning', 'baddies', killing people or whatever, it is just an introduction to music, sounds, ... He LOVES it.
Of course, he likes also me playing with him to it, and making mario boucing into walls at super mario world really makes him laugh.
Can't forget dysentery...
:3
:P But I would really like to get a copy of that one. All I remember was the computers it ran on were PowerPC's running one of the color versions of the Apple OS.
It was a while before it occurred to me to look it up but once I did, I wound up reading up on the history of the Oregon Trail and really made me appreciate dying of natural causes
And speaking of ancient games, as a kid, before we were allowed to start playing Oregon Trail we had to prove we understood the concepts of operating a computer with a mouse. Crap everyone knows by now
I find it strangely interesting (and entertaining) that the sex-starved, pale, anti-social geeks that supposedly frequent this place have so many strong opinions about how someone else should raise their child. The mind boggles...
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
You exemplify a growing trend for people to spend way too much fucking time raising everyone else's kids.
How about you just worry about your own, let he worry about his, while I worry about mine?
You OK with that, champ?
Or would you really prefer that everyone else tell you what to do with your own children, too? I'm sure that no matter what you say about them, I can find something sufficiently abnormal about your statement to feed a steady stream of admonishment toward you, your children, and your methods of raising a family...
But I won't. It's not my job to raise your kids.
Kid-proof tablet..
Yes, we did (and do) read to her throughout, and yes, she does have some reading challenges for which she's getting help, although she's extremely bright and social. My oldest son taught himself to read before he was 2, but then again, he was hyperlexic and on the autistic spectrum. Our middle son started to read in first grade, and in fact was encouraged by Pokemon on his Gameboy to work on that.
Now about those games....? {ProfJonathan}
As the parent of a 5yo daughter, I definitely agree with games mentioned in the parent post. Super Princess Peach is probably the best in that group (in my opinion), because it strikes a good balance of being easy for kids to control while still being very fun to play. It also encourages thinking skills -- you can use elemental tools such as fire to melt ice obstacles, water to douse fires, etc.
I also agree that it's okay for games to have words, even if the child cannot yet read them. My daughter is just learning to read "the right way" with phonetics, yet can recognize dozens (maybe hundreds) of words because I've read them to her and she's memorized the combination of letters.
Oh, and that's another good point. Playing these games with your kid is important *and* fun. Read the dialogs to her, help her when she's stuck, play co-op, whatever. It turns an otherwise isolated activity into family bonding.