Niki s Kindergarten

Niki's Kindergarten is a Vocabulary Builder program designed to expand and build a young kid's WRITTEN vocabulary. A prerequisite to using this program is that the child should already know how to write the English alphabet. This program was jointly produced by the dad-and-daughter team of Dr.Kumar (who is a US board certified Neurologist) and Nikhita (who is a full time kindergartener). If you don't have 10 minutes a day to spend with your kid don't bother buying this software, it won't do anyone any good. There are two types of kids educational software on the market these days. There is the baby-sitter type software, which essentially captures the child's fancy, with loud sounds and whirling images. The child is likely to sit in front of the monitor and watch all the action. What gets overlooked is that while these programs do get the child's attention, the emphasis is so much on entertainment and making a lot of noise (gotta convince the busy parent that they are getting their money's worth of computer noise!) that the kids learn little or nothing. The second type is the parent supervised software. Niki's Kindergarten is one such software. It has one objective, and that is to build the child's vocabulary of written English. The right time to use it is once the child knows how to write the alphabet. The program contains a total of 390 words. The parent gets to pick the words that he or she feels is appropriate for the child's individual level and capabilities. It has to be emphasized that this is not a baby-sitter type of software. It is a teaching aid for the the intelligent parent. It just does one thing and does it well- it helps you teach your kid new (WRITTEN) words every day. It is not every day that a kindergarten learning software is jointly produced by a 4 year old girl and her Neurologist Dad. Niki (the program is named for her) is a kindergarten kid. Her role in producing the program included a lot of critically important things. Niki picked the pictures for each corresponding word. She also did the voice recordings for a large number of words. And most important of all, she is the one who tested the program out for her own school needs. Vocabulary homework used to be a big headache for everybody and burnt up hours of what would have been playtime. The Vocabulary Builder reduced the time spent on vocabulary to a few minutes a day, with much better results. Dr.Kumar's role in this production was the programming for the software.The program was created in a Visual Basic 6 environment. Dr.Kumar is a full-time neurologist and is Board Certified in Neurology by the American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry. He received his Neurology training at the University of Kentucky Medical Center where he also was Neurology Chief Resident. Dr. Kumar has also served as a neurologist in the states of Nebraska and Washington. One might say that this software is for gifted kids. The author believes that all or most kids are gifted and whether this becomes evident or not depends on the time and effort that the parent is willing to invest. In other words, it all hinges on parental availability.