Eye Level Malaysia
Join our Facebook Group

Friday, March 13, 2009

School Holiday Activity: Creating a story with Storybook Weaver Deluxe


I wanted to do this preview later but I better get it done today or not at all. (Reason: Kids will be on school holiday and I won't have the luxury of time alone when they are at home next week.)

The above is the Storybook Weaver Deluxe writing program. I bought it from Edushop for RM19 plus RM6 for transport. I received my order on the next day after I ordered it. Very fast. I don't know whether the price is expensive or not because I hadn't looked around. I had wanted to buy the KidPix Deluxe 3 or 4 for my girl since she was using it at school but they no longer supply that so I found this instead.

It is a delightful writing program, a creative program that has both the elements of text editing input as well as a paint program. It is quite easy to use.

When you start a story, you are taken to the title page. Here, you input your title and author name and choose a background plus any objects you want on that page. You can also select your font type and size.

After that you move on to the pages. On each page, you can choose the backgrounds as well as the objects. You can move them around, increase or decrease the size etc. Then you type in the text for your stories.

You can choose to have music to go along with each page as well as for each object. Objects will have sound effects when you click on it. You can even make your objects talk by recording your own voice. The kids were thrilled when we recorded their voices barking and growling as animals or simply talking.

It also has a text to speech feature so you can get each page read out loud if your pc has this capability.

There are lots of scenes and objects available. Fantasy, Space, Everyday, People, Animals, Furniture, you name it. Its up to your child's imagination.

Its meant for kids age 6 and up and I think that would be just right unless you are prepared to sit with them and work with them. Older and more creative kids can use the spell check and thesaurus as well as the paint program to alter the added objects.

This school holidays, our main project is to create our own story with the Storybook Weaver Deluxe. The kids are really looking forward to it.

Below is the title and Page 1 of the story I created for illustration for this post. Do you like it? In Page 1, I selected a plain background and added all the furniture, people and technological devices in it myself. Its fun! You can add little details too like a painting of the wall or a pretty ceiling or wall lamp, plants etc but I'm too lazy. Page 1 has text on it "Mommy bloggers love new devices" but it doesn't show here though. Oh, btw, I could easily upload this because it also allows you to save your story as a Web Document.





Popular Posts