Wizz-E review and giveaway

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Closed~ Congratulations to the Winner #5 Shawn!

A  recently launched  website http://www.wizz-e.com/  is an online publisher of children's picture books - both original titles and reinventions of traditional tales. They bring the books to life through animated illustrations, read along to the audio as the words highlight or click on a word to hear it spoken for emerging independent readers. [Click a word not enabled on House that Jack Built or Old Mother Hubbard]

Each book comes with a comprehension/recall quiz to check understanding and engagement with the story. Their aim is to bring reading materials to young kids to foster a love of books and reading by making it fun. As you will know the more exposure a child has to reading the more their literacy levels improve. This is a way of making screen time educational and fun.

One of their books, Hoop-la the Hippo by Pati Maddison, recently won in the iParenting Outstanding Product Awards 2009! 

We had the pleasure of reviewing many titles on Wizz-E.   Both of my kids were able to check it out.  Zachary really enjoyed The three little pigs.  At first he was driving me insane with the click on the word function.  He kept clicking on one word over and over.  With my help we went over how to use the Hear the Story function.  The stories were read at a very good pace.  Many times we read too fast for the kids to pay attention to the whole story and retain the info.  I really liked how the pages flipped, just like if you were reading the story.  The cool thing was that the illustrations on the pages were a little animated.  They were not like watching a movie, but parts of the picture were animated.  An example of this is from the story Goldilocks and the three bears.  At the end of the story Goldilocks runs home, and the illustration has Goldilocks in an animated run.  Kennedy really enjoyed that.  It was enough to catch her attention.

 They have lots of classic titles like those I mentioned.  They also have some educational titles like What time is it.  I look forward to using this one with Zachary and hope it helps teach him how to read a clock. 

Another nice aspect is that after the stories are read there is a short quiz.  It lets you see how much your child retained from the story.  They also have a free game section.  At the moment there are only two games, but they will be adding more.  The games were a simple teddy bear search and find game and a puzzle game.  I liked how in the puzzle game, after the puzzle is completed the image is animated and sings.  It was cute.  The games were somewhat simple, but a little difficult in their function.  The puzzle game I had to help Zach by moving the pieces so he could see them better before he could arrange them correctly.  The teddy bear one you had to make sure your cursor was right in the center of the bear or it wouldnt circle the bear as found. 

I really think this is something we need to get our children more involved with.  I do believe soon enough many of our childrens text books will be online.  I think this is a good way to get our young children using the computer in a more educational way. 

Thank you Wizz-E for letting us review your site and ebooks!  Would you like to check them out too?

Win it:  Thanks to Wizz-E ebooks, they have generously offered to give one lucky reader 5 free ebooks of their choice.  To enter: Sign up for their free ebooks, and tell me what you like about them. 

extra entries:

-tell me another book you would like to purchase from their e-book store.

-follow my  blog

-follow me on twitter

-grab my button

-tweet this giveaway linking back to here

Please post a seperate comment for each entry.  Giveaway ends Sunday 10/4.  Winner will be chosen by random.org. 

*I received the opportunity to review this product thanks to my membership at The product review place.

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