Fireman Sam

KS1 - KS2 (Years 1 - 6)

Cross-curricular

This product is distributed by B-DAG Cyf t/a The Productive Play Company (Tel: 02920 550600)

Fireman Sam is based on the popular T.V. program and features characters that are familiar to the children. The activities cover a wide range of abilities and tasks and many are accompanied by a worksheet, or activity that can be carried out away from the computer. The CD-ROM is easy for the children to navigate and there is an onscreen help button for children to use.

This title definitely seems to meet expectations. It is very closely based on and linked to the popular Fireman Sam TV series, providing a highly entertaining and familiar context for the educational games contained on the CD-ROM. The whole package hangs together cohesively under the premise that users log-on as Trainees/Members of the Pontypandy Fire Brigade and progress through a series of developmental training and emergency situations. Visual and auditory quality is excellent and the content wide and stimulating. All National Curriculum subjects are covered and cross-referenced and non-computer based links and extension tasks are also suggested. Valuable opportunities are also given to record and monitor pupils' work through the Station Logbooks.

I used one particular activity on the CD ROM to support our topic of money. The children were having great difficulty recognising coins and carrying out simple addition using coins. I had set up a shop in our role-play area and I wanted an ICT activity that would support this and introduce a different approach to recognition and addition of coins. I chose to use shopping crazy with small groups of children, as a separate activity during my afternoon sessions. Children worked in pairs. The children logged on to the CD-ROM under their own name, selected their level and choose to visit Dillys' shop. They then carried out a matching activity, finding items on a shopping list and then choosing the correct coins to pay for the items. At the end of the activity they received a certificate to go in their logbooks.

Fireman Sam was used daily in the classroom with individual pupils on a supported one to one basis. The overall aim was to reinforce ICT skills through a motivating topic linked package. We were working on Fireman Sam as one of Our Favourite TV programmes in our term's Play and Leisure topic. The four most able pupils in my class of seven pupils with Severe and Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties were logged on to the Pontypandy Training program and had almost as much fun creating their onscreen caricatures, as in tackling each activity. Success at each activity was recorded in the pupils' individual Logbooks and the software included a folder of printable worksheets to reinforce areas of learning.