Disney's Ready to Read with Pooh

The first in Disney's new Learning Series, this CD offers nine activities focusing on early reading skills. It uses the authentic voices and animations of each Winnie the Pooh character and sets the activities in the 100 Acre Wood. The software nicely pulls the themes from the classic Winnie the Pooh stories into some of the activities. Tigger gets stuck in a tree, Pooh sorts his honey jars, Tigger needs help with his detective stories, and so on. Clickables are cleverly integrated into the theme. While some of the activities are better than others, in general they are solid. After signing in, the child's name appears on a mailbox on his or her own tree house. Kids can go North, West, or East where they find three activities per area. They can help Eeyore repair his torn book by matching pictures to words and they can match letters to sounds that are hidden in Jack-In-The-Boxes. Other activities let children complete rhymes with objects on a table and follow Tigger's instructions to act out a mystery. Our least favorite game was a word completion activity, in which kids connect the dots of a letter to create a word. Slow responsivity made connecting the dots too hard. We also wished for lower case letters in the alphabet activity. Even though there were three levels for each activity, the hardest level wasn't hard enough. Kids loved the certificates and other printables, however, and even with its sometimes slow pace, the program was a hit.

Teaches: reading, alphabet order, letters, sounds, phonics

Age Range: 3, 4, 5, 6