My kids are laughing themselves silly, thanks to a computer CD we've had for ages, though it's the kind of thing that renews the fun each time they rediscover it. "American Girls Premiere Playmaker" is an old CD (not even made by the company anymore) but it's new around here every few months.
The CD allows you to create plays, using characters from the American Girl series, who walk and talk and, in our case, say the silliest things. I can't say my kids are creating works on a par with Shakespeare; they tend more toward the theater of the absurd. But I look at it this way: they're using their imaginations (to create a play), they're using the keyboard (to type in the dialogue they make up), and they're getting spelling practice (because often, if they spell a word incorrectly, the character will pronounce it incorrectly. Not always -- Betsy comes up with some pretty accurate phonetic spellings.) And, they're having fun. They roar at the computer-generated voice that makes their dialogue a reality, if a stiff, robotic one.
Though American Girl no longer sells the game, I just checked Half.com and it looks like they have quite a few used copies available.
A caveat: the game was a little complicated and annoying to figure out at first, but now that they've got the process down, to say they enjoy it would be an understatement.
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