Oliver's Crosswords

Item Description:

Oliver's Crosswords builds student vocabularies, exercises spelling skills, and encourages strategic thinking. Oliver’s Crosswords is published by Microgram Software and is for grades 3 to 8.

Oliver's puzzles build both spelling and vocabulary skills while providing many problem solving opportunities. Students can work with either word definitions or sentence context clues.

To assist beginning puzzle solvers, the teacher can have Oliver provide the first one, two, or three letters of each word at the start of the puzzle. Oliver can provide additional letters upon request. Access to letter hints can be restricted.

Oliver keeps score, and high scores are listed on Oliver;s Whoo;s Whoo in Crosswords chart. Oliver's puzzles use words that are useful to students in intermediate grades.

Students may work alone or with partners. A crossword puzzle grid surrounds Oliver on the screen. Definitions appear at the bottom of the screen as the student moves through the grid with arrow keys or the space bar. Letter keys are used to type words on the grid, and Oliver signals whether answers are right or wrong. Several kinds of clues are available for stumped students to use (if the teacher allows it). A score is accumulated as the puzzle is completed; and, the score is influenced by the amount of help the player has requested. High scores are listed on the Whoo's Whoo in Crosswords chart.

By using program options, the teacher controls whether sentence context clues, word definitions, or both are available to the student. The program can be set to put the first one, two, or three letters of each word into the puzzle when the grid is printed on the screen. Also, the teacher can limit the number of letter clues a child can use while at work. These program options allow significant adjustment to the challenge of the puzzle-solving task in order to meet student needs.

Oliver's Crosswords provides three kinds of printout worksheets to the teacher who wishes to give students further exposure to the vocabulary contained in each puzzle. These are 1) fill-in-the-blank sentences, 2) fill-in-the-blank sentences with a word list, and 3) word and definition matching.

Students enjoy feelings of accomplishment when solving Oliver's puzzles. Beginners sometimes think the puzzles are too hard; but, with unlimited use of clues, all answers are revealed. Without clues, the puzzles can provide satisfying challenges to high achievers.

Program Requirements for Windows: Windows Vista, XP, 2000, 98 running on PC's < 6 years old.

Program Requirements for Macintosh: Programs with Easy Track Mac OS 10.5.3 Leopard to OS 9 running on Macs < 6 years old, including Intel Core Duo machines with Rosetta.

Programs without Easy Track Mac OS 10.2.8 Classic to OS 8.6 running on PowerMacs or above

Using Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000
Micrograms products compatible with Easy Track run under all the Windows operating systems listed above. Network versions can be served off of Windows 2008, 2003, 2000, NT, and Novell (>3.x) servers; or they can be run from the local hard drives of individual workstations and/or stand-alone machines. We offer nothing, at present, designed for Cytrix, NComputing environments, other terminal servers, or the "CD tower" environment. We offer no web-based products

Using Macintosh
Micrograms products compatible with Easy Track run on OS 10 native and on Intel Core 2 Duo machines with Rosetta. This means OS 10.2 thru OS 10.6. Snow Leopard initially requires that Rosetta be downloaded free from Apple. Network Macintosh program versions can be served off of Windows 2008, 2003, 2000, and Novell servers with Macintosh partitions, as well as from Macintosh machines running OS 10 Server. They also can be run from the local hard drives of individual workstations and/or stand-alone machines. Micrograms programs run fine in hardwired Macintosh computer labs, and they run better with newer versions of AirPort than with old.

Easy Track Updates
Easy Track is designed to be easily updated from time to time. When new programs are released by Micrograms, Easy Track will be updated to accommodate them. Suggestions from users may be added to Easy Track, and if any issues are discovered regarding Easy Track's operation, updates can resolve the problems. So before you begin importing student names into the Easy Track management system, we strongly suggest you download Micrograms latest Easy Track update for free from www.micrograms.com. And, from time to time we suggest you revisit the update page of www.micrograms.com to keep your school up to date with the latest Easy Track version.

Promotion: Buy ANY Micrograms Network/Site License, and get a second Network/Site License (of equal or lesser value at the same school) for 50% OFF!