3-D Animated Animals Help Kindergartners Read

A new reading curriculum based on augmented reality technology grabs student attention and shows them difficult concepts in a visual form.

"Letters alive" uses 26 animals to help pre-kindergartners and kindergartners learn to read. And according to research by its creator, Logical Choice Technologies, it's the first augmented reality reading curriculum.

Each of the animals appears on a card representing a letter of the alphabet. And when a teacher or student places one of the cards under a document camera, the animal comes to life.

Designed to work with a document camera, interactive whiteboard and laptop, the animal cards pop up 3-D animated images. Students combine the animal cards with 94 word cards to create four-word sentences.

For example, the demonstrator in this video uses the sentence, "The shark is red." The shark turns red in response. When the cards say, "The frog can eat," Frankie Frog responds by snapping up a bug that appears. And after this sentence, "The giraffe can swim," Gerty Giraffe shakes her head to say, "No, I can't swim."

By pressing different squares on the bottom of the giraffe card, students learn about the letter and the animal. They learn the name of the letter, the two different sounds that "G" makes, and the way it looks in upper and lower case.

They also learn the name of the animal and what sounds the giraffe makes. And when students place the animal card and the video card next to each other, they see a video of a real-life giraffe in its natural habitat.

While "Letters alive" won't be released for a month or two, it's already helping kindergartners and first-graders learn in a Florida elementary school that's been beta testing a piece of the program for a few weeks.

The Florida beta test

At Audubon Park Elementary, reading resource teacher Audra Cervi works with different groups of four to six kindergartners for about 25 minutes a day. For many of these kids, English is not their native language. And others struggle with reading.

But the 3-D animals in "Letters alive" grab their attention and help them identify letters, sounds and animals.

“It just excites them about reading," Cervi said, "and they don’t even realize that they’re learning letters and sounds and reading.”

In Margaux Quinn's multi-age kindergarten and first grade class, the 18 to 22 students have most of their letters and sounds down. So they use the curriculum to work on nouns, verbs and adjectives.

When the kids see a giraffe turn blue after they put a card down, they realize that "blue" is a describing characteristic of the animal, not something the animal is doing. But if the giraffe is eating, they know she is doing something.

“It really made it more visual again for them to kind of get concepts that are a little bit more difficult for them, like adjectives, nouns and verbs,” Quinn said.

With the cards, they phrase questions and answers in complete sentences. And after working with the cards, their writing has improved because they automatically answer in complete sentences.

Because the curriculum is in beta, getting the animal to say a name or sound isn't always smooth, Cervi said. But she did expect challenges like that and she's anxiously waiting for the final product to be released.

Quinn's class is so excited about the technology that students want more cards. And they also want to use more than four words in their sentences.

“They want to elaborate on their sentences," Quinn said, "and when they can only put four cards down, they get frustrated that they can’t put more.”

If the curriculum developer allowed students to use more than four cards, the curriculum would be more widely used instead of just for intensive reading situations, she said.

Overall, the students get excited about learning with the realistic-looking animals. Some of the kids have never seen an iguana or a peacock. So when they see one, they gasp.

In kindergarten, some students don't know how to put sounds together, don't know their letters and are used to being at home playing. And that provides these teachers a major challenge as they try to teach them to read. But the new curriculum makes the process fun.

Cervi says, “When they first come into kindergarten, it’s very hard to get some of the kids, especially our little boys, to really want to read. They want to play." Quinn added, “And this seems more like playing than actually reading.”