Children's Sing Along

Copyright: KBkids.com

Karaoke has made it to your home computer! This is not an impressive program, but allows your youngest children to sing some of their favorite songs with accompaniment. Singalong does not include a vocal track, so your children must either know the songs, or be able to read. While testers saw this as a major drawback, it also gives beginning readers extra practice.

From the main menu, your child can select one of fifty familiar songs. Songs are well known, including:

• Bingo
• Do Your Ears Hang Low
• Old MacDonald
• The Itsy Bitsy Spider
• If All the Raindrops

Many of the included songs have become familiar to today's audience through the popular television show Barney. If your kids have grown up with Barney, they will definitely be familiar with the included songs.

Songs are played using tape recorder type controls. Recording is not an option. Your children can adjust the speed of the song, as well as the volume and pitch (a particularly nice touch!). There are four buttons at the top of the screen, which allow your children to add punctuated sounds such as beeps and whistles as the song plays. Young testers, who preferred to sing along, and jump from song to song, quickly dismissed these.

Graphically, there is nothing fancy at all. The words are shown at the bottom of the screen and are highlighted one at time as the song progresses. There are not animations, or other fancy features. The absence of a vocal track as an option was sorely missed. Children who can not read, and may not know a particular song, have no way or learning the song unless you choose to sing with them. Children who love to sing seemed to enjoy the chance to sing into a microphone with 'real' accompaniment.

Bottom Line: A good program for beginning readers who like to sing. Nothing particularly impressive here, however.

Ratings: (based on KBkids.com's 4 star rating system)

Overall: 2 1/2

BrainGain: 2

FunFactor: 2 1/2

EasePlease: 4

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