Val, the cat, encourages children to read aloud, using a microphone that hooks up to a personal computer. Kids sing and read along to 24 songs across 8 engaging activities that teach them more than 200 important early reading words. Val and her friends interact with the student, who learns the alphabet, phonemic awareness, consonent and vowel sounds, digraphs and letter blends, sounding out words, reading sentences, comprehension, beginning spelling and vocabulary.