Children’s English Site Review: Roy the Zebra
What’s Roy the Zebra?
Roy the Zebra is a reading site for children that centers on a group of animal characters. The main feature of the site is the nine-part story of Roy’s escape from a zoo and search for his herd. There are also a lot of interactive reading games using the characters introduced in the story, and Roy-themed songs.
What Roy the Zebra Does Well
For English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, the interactive reading games are the most useful resources. The games are fun and accessible. They are appropriate for students under ten who are learning to read and form sentences. The games cover such things as forming words that follow different patterns, alphabetical order, capitalisation, placement of periods (or full-stops as the say in British English), and reading for comprehension.
What Needs Work
This site was designed to teach reading to children who speak English as their first language. As a result, there is more of an emphasis on pure reading than materials designed for EFL students, who don’t live in English speaking countries and need help with listening, phonics, and pronunciation.
Roy the Zebra would better serve EFL students by having more audio content linked to their stories and games:
- hearing recordings of the words after spelling them correctly
- adding narration do the story
- seeing the lyrics written as they are sung.
You can’t really call these problems since the site isn’t intended for EFL students.
How to Use Roy the Zebra
Most children who speak English as a second or foreign language should probably start with the interactive games. The interactive games are simpler than the stories, fun, and educational.
Also make sure you look for the sentence-level games. A tab linking to them appears near the middle of the page when you open the Interactive Games page. I missed the tab the first time I visited the site but the sentence-level games are really good so you won’t want to miss them.
My Favourite
I really like the “Does it Make Sense” games. There are two of them on the sentence-level games page and both games are well thought out. Both of the games use simple words. The games require the child to really think about the meaning of the words, but they also provide a few clues to help the child get the right answer.
The first game is the easier of the two. The child is presented two similar sentences and has to choose the one that makes sense. I think restricting the possible choices in this way really reduces the amount of stress on the child learning to read and lets them enjoy the activity more.
The second game is a little more difficult. The child is shown a sentence with two words out of order. The words are repeated on the bottom of the page and the child has to drag and drop the words in the correct order immediately beneath the incorrect sentence. Showing the nearly correct sentence is really important, I think this game would be too difficult if it were totally open-ended.
Both games are definitely worth a try.
The Verdict
Although Roy the Zebra was designed for children whose first language is English, there is still a lot ESL and EFL students.