Preschool University (www.preschoolu.com) has introduced Sound Beginnings 1.0 for Mac OS X, the fourth in their series of educational apps designed to help young children learn to read. It requires Mac OS X 10.6 or higher and is available free through the Mac App Store in the Education category.

Utilizing Montessori principles, Sound Beginnings helps build strong phonics skills and helps develop foundational reading skills, according to Preschool University President Richard Colombini. Six learning games offer practice using the sounds and not the names of the letters, and lowercase instead of uppercase letters at the beginning, middle, and end of words.

Sound Beginnings includes six interactive games, where players match the correct letter/sound to the first, middle, or last sound of the word identifying a pictured object. The first three games, in order of increasing challenge, ask the child to select the correct letter/sound for the beginning, end, and middle of a word.