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08/08/2004 |
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Book of Pooh - A Story with a Tail An interactive story chock full of extras
The book of Pooh runs under all versions of Windows as well as the Apple Mac. It’s aimed at ages 2 through 5 although the younger ones will probably need some help when using it. After a bright and colourful intro the main challenge begins. Pooh and all his friends are eager to help Eeyore find his missing tail. You join them in all their activities whilst they search the Hundred Acre Wood. You select an activity by clicking on Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit, Pooh, Owl Kessie and of course Eeyore. At each step of the way the characters provide lots of friendly encouragement. The games include Poohs Alphabet Stream where you guide a boat in to objects in the stream. Each object is represented by a letter and once you touch it a letter of the alphabet is collected. Considering the target age group some of the choices for words seem odd. I can’t imagine many 4 year olds would understand P for Petunia or U for Ukulele although you could argue this increases their vocabulary. A nice diversion is Piglets Short stories. Here you pick a story from the book then move stickers on to a picture until they are all stuck on. Once complete Piglet reads the story and each word is hi-lighted as it is read. This is a really good idea and captivated our testers as well as being a great learning aid for reading and word recognition. We’d consider buying this disc just for this activity alone.
We also liked Rabbits kitchen where you can choose a recipe and have Owl read out the ingredients which you then need to select from a shelf. You felt like you were really cooking and you even got to decorate your cake at the end. On the downside, this did require some fine control to select things though so perhaps one for the older children to really get something out of. The package also includes a set of 30 activity ‘printables’ including mazes, cut-outs colouring in pages and more. The manual said this was available from the startup screen but it was actually on the install screen which threw us initially. The Book of Pooh manages to teach a wide range of skills including numbers, word association, shapes and colours and even memory skills in a colourful and interesting way.
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