Curious George Reading and Phonics

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $24.99

Features:

• Letter/Sound Recognition
• Vowels & Consonants
• Rhyming, Word Building & Word Recognition
• spellin
• Alphabetical Order

Customer Reviews:

What a waste of money! [Posted on 2002-12-26]
I bought this game as a Christmas gift for my twin grandsons, who are three years old and very adept at using a mouse. When we loaded the game, we were shocked to discover that it requires children to navigate using the arrow buttons and space bar, rather than the mouse! (Try to explain that to a mouse-savvy three-year old!)

If this were the game's only flaw, I could have lived with it, since they eventually would get the hang of keyboard navigation. However, once they started playing the game, I was unable to exit from it. Clicking on the exit button produced no results. When I tried to exit by navigating through the windows menu, rather than shutting down, the game instead continued to run -- in two separate versions -- the audio portion only. We had to remove the CD-rom and crash the computer to exit.

Needless to say, this did not make for a joyous Christmas morning! And since we opened the software, we cannot return it to Amazon.[com]

Save your money for a game that preschoolers can actually play, such as Blues Clues Learning Time!

A mixed bag; some bits great, some not [Posted on 2003-02-04]
I bought this for my daughter's 4th birthday, since she wanted a game of her own (her brother is 8 and loves computer games). She is also a big Curious George fan.

The adventures consist of five short phonics games punctuated by a little arcade-style game in which George must 'leap' (using the arrow keys) to capture bananas as he moves to the next location. My daughter had only the slightest difficulty learning to use the arrow keys and the space bar, and now she's got it conquered. I did not have any problems installing or operating the game (on our XP machine).

My problem lies in the widely varying difficulty of the games. The first one involves letter recognition; the second involves picking out the sounds of letters that START words; the third involves sorting 'packages' into those labeled with word that rhyme and words that do not; the fourth involves picking out the sounds of letters that END words; the fifth involves spelling actual words.

Even when set at the easiest level, the rhyming game (#3) and the spelling game (#5) were way over her head. The rhyming game is very speedy; the packages will fall off a conveyer belt if you do not pick them up fast enough, and manipulating the arrow keys in this case was way too complicated. The spelling game, even at the low level, involved silent letters in dipthongs like 'leaf.' She could sound out words like 'dog' just fine but the silent letters left her frustrated.

The game is progressive - you don't move onto the next one until you've finished with the one you're currently on, so getting stuck on #3 led to whimpering and sadness.

Nevertheless, she is constantly asking to play. It's a fine game but you'll have to plan on playing with your kid until he/she can manage the rhyming and spelling alone.

Curious George  [Posted on 2004-09-04]
My daughter is 5 years old and has more than 2 dozen computer educational games to choose from. She consistently comes back to curious george to play the dinasour phonics game and the alphabet window washing game. It's very good for the phonic games. She is already reading first reader books and yet this softwear is still challenging her. The game has 3 levels to choose from based on your childs knowledge. Most of her other games use the mouse exclusively, and it was a little confusing at first when some of the game required the arrow keys and space bar, but she had to learn about these sooner or later. After she mastered certain areas, the software seemed to lock her out of that portion, but it can be overidden in the level menu.

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