Dear Ms/Sr.:

KIDWARE provides the educational elements that meet the goal of the Early Reading First initiative: to provide preschoolers with the cognitive skills essential for reading success. Further, KIDWARE supports a seamless transition for those children entering Kindergarten because they maintain and continue their progress in skills and competencies related to reading.

KIDWARE is used nationally in approximately 6700 Head Start and Corporate Child Care centers that serve children ages three to five-years-old. For these classrooms KIDWARE provides an integrated technology curriculum that focuses on building cognitive and oral language including verbal skills, phonemic awareness and pre-reading in preschool children. KIDWARE methodology (lesson plans and procedures) reflects the latest research that indicates the combination of literature-based instruction and phonics is more powerful than either method used alone. Additionally, KIDWARE offers systematic documentation of children's achievement in these areas:

• Language development including listening and understanding, speaking and communicating
  
• Early literacy including phonological awareness, alphabet recognition and identification, book knowledge and appreciation, print awareness and concepts
  
• Mathematics including number and operations, counting to solve problems, number and numeral recognition, patterns and measurement
  

Additionally, KIDWARE meets many of the requirements of the Reading First initiative. Children have an opportunity to practice and apply literacy skills, including phonological principles as they write, read and create at the computer.

Prescriptive extension activities are based upon student's software program selection and use. Reports are generated that provide parents at home activities that assist learners in mastering concepts. Reports for teachers offer additional classroom strategies that lead to understanding.

The following essential components of reading instruction are included as part of KIDWARE:

• Phonemic Awareness--children have the ability to see and hear what they say. Student samples of word pronunciation are saved for assessment
  
• Phonics--presentation of common word labels and their phonetic make-up helps young learners identify patterns and recognize in words
  
• Vocabulary Development:
  Listening vocabulary-- the words needed to understand what is heard
  Speaking vocabulary-- the words used when speaking
  Reading vocabulary -- the words needed to understand what is read
  Writing vocabulary -- the words used in writing
• Reading fluency--including oral reading skills correlates with grade level dictionaries of words used in writing
  
• Reading comprehension strategies--employs planning and sequencing strategies to aid in understanding text passages and developing writing for communication
  

Further, KIDWARE enhances teachers' abilities to individualize for students based upon assessment data that is collected as the student uses the computer-based learning activities.

In addition to the built-in assessments in KIDWARE that offer teachers opportunities to observe and evaluate student performance, MOBIUS has developed a computer-based diagnostic tool for Pre-k and Kindergarten. This tool, Outcomes Express, specifically focuses on language development, literacy and mathematics. Teachers are able to quickly assess students, group those with similar needs, print prescriptive learning activities and generate individual and classroom summaries of progress. This assessment is designed to be administered three times during the school year. The resulting reports help educators emphasize areas of needed instruction in addition to offering specific strategies for remediation. Data are automatically analyzed and summarized for immediate classroom use. This approach supports data driven decisions required for tailoring and personalizing instructions that meet individual student needs and promote reading success.

KIDWARE España is used in 1300 elementary schools in Puerto Rico and KIDWARE Millennium System in approximately 10,000 primary grade classrooms across the nation. KIDWARE supports ESL students by offering language options other than English. Several Native American Indian tribes have complete translations of the software.

Professional Development

The Education TURNKEY Technology Use surveys indicate that those software programs with the greatest use in schools and maximum effectiveness are programs that include extensive professional development and support. This finding is echoed in the requirements of the Reading First guidance.

Congruent with the emphasis on explicit teaching of the essential components of reading is the need for professional development. MOBIUS has developed a computer-based set of exercises for beginning teachers. This CD-ROM introduces teachers to the features and strategies used in KIDWARE and provides the basis for integration of technology into effective reading practice. Additional workshops incorporate hands-on learning and emphasize linking technology with curriculum and assessment of child outcomes.

Note: One of the major points of the Reading First program is the emphasis on students who may have disabilities in areas that relate to learning to read. Many young students with reading problems or the potential for reading problems have tendencies toward distractibility and lack of focus in attention to learning tasks. KIDWARE software is highly interactive and engaging for young learners. The student has a high level of control over the features of the technology. The computer does not present irrelevant "bells and whistles" that would be considered distracting to the learner. Children with attention deficient problems are able to focus on the task at hand without automatic interruptions from the computer.

The underlining of text in this document denotes requirements specified in the Reading First (NCLB) guidance and/or child outcomes legislatively mandated by Head Start.

MOBIUS Corporation
1-800-426-2710
Fax: 1-703-684-2919
info@kidware.com