Software and Games : GSP : Children's Fun & Learning : Ages 5-8

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Play and Learn: Reading & Counting

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Learning Ladder: Years 1 & 2

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Disney Hotshots Lion King 2: Paddle Bash / Conga Longa

Avanquest Software

When you start The Lion King II: Simba's Pride you enter a very atmospheric animated jungle. Paddle Bash and Conga Longa are easy games to pick up but they are difficult to master.
In Paddle Bash you grab a paddle and you get yourself ready to send balls flying as you try to knock down as many bricks as you can. As you would expect from Disney, there are plenty of fun, colourful special effects as bricks are successfully broken up. Smart keyboard skills are required as you try to angle your shots and send balls bouncing in every direction. And as you score points, you help Timon or Pumbaa move closer to a tasty bug treat. There are clear printed instructions with each game and your mouse is represented on the screen as a lion paw-print. If you want to break yourself slowly into the game, you can start at the kitten or cub level.
The second game, Conga Longa invites you to keep the jungle beat as you join a swinging conga-line of cartoon animals. The aim is to move your cub around and gather up other animals into a conga line. As you dance by an animal, it hops into your line. But if you break your line, you lose your dancing animals. With the jungle music pumping away in the background, this is a tough game to get to grips with. But if your cub dances over a red flower, you get bonus points and there are specific bonus animals you have to collect. It's an original game but it requires a lot of practice to get your conga swinging properly! --Justin Hunt
Bob the Builder Can We Fix It?

Avanquest Software

Can We Fix It?. Of course we can, and with this BBC software package little builders will be better equipped than ever!. Featuring the chirpy Bob and his mechanical multitude of talented friends, this fun package is a mixture of educational encouragement and pure out-and-out fun.
Once loaded, you are invited to move the cursor around Wendy's office to select your tasks: hover over the phone, and it rings with a plumbing job; go near the fax, and a job comes in for Roley. Keep moving around, and you will find enough jobs to keep little fingers and minds busy for hours.
In "Hedgehog Rescue", the aim is firstly to help Lofty the Crane build a tunnel to save the scared hedgehogs from crossing the road. Children must match pipe shapes to tunnel shapes, and construct the route. The next, more difficult game, involves Wendy herding the hedgehogs into the tunnel--easier than it sounds, since one particularly persistent hedgehog seems unwilling to go.
In "Travis' Race Day", choose between Scoop or Dizzy to a head-to-head around an obstacle-strewn track. Guide your challenger by mouse or arrow keys--again, not as easy as it sounds, and a great developmental aid for hand-to-eye co-ordination.
"Can We Build It?" involves knocking down an unsafe bridge, then using colour recognition to match the bricks to rebuild it. Roley needs a hand with unruly tarmac in "Bubble Trouble", when you must guide him over the bubbles to even out the road. And in "Scary Spud", you must move Spud around the screen to scare off the crows. But the crowning glory is "Wendy's Birthday", where guests first decorate her cake then join in the fun line dancing. Also included on each game is "Where's Pilchard?", a hide-and-seek game for the shy, blue cat.
Accompanied throughout by Neil Morrisey's narration and the superb music from the TV show, (also now a CD single), this package builds on many elementary educational skills to make little builders into fully fledged Bobs. And while it is not that quick to load (missing plug-ins are provided, but it may take some time) it is well worth the wait.
Testers of around two years old found this package fun and evocative of their favourite TV character, though they did require constant supervision and most of the games were beyond mastering. This is a superb educational aid and lots of fun. (Suitable for ages 2 to 6).--Lucie Naylor
Play and Learn: Writing & Calculating

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Disney Hotshots Lion King 1: Bug Drop / Slingshooter

Avanquest Software

Disney favourites Timon and Pumbaa invite you to join their jungle shooting gallery in the first game on The Lion King arcade title.
To play Slingshooter, you load up with berries and then fire them with your mouse button at the targets, which can be anything from a laughing hyena popping out of a tree to a crocodile suddenly surfacing from a pool. You are also given a list of characters not to target. This is a fast-moving, fun game that is easy to play. Timon and Pumbaa introduce the rules and crack gags at each other's expense, urging you not to fire berries at them.
In the second action-packed arcade game, Bug Drop, it's slightly more complicated. You have to think fast. It's a game of strategy, speed and bug identification skills. As Timon and Pumbaa drop different colourful bugs, you have to quickly match them up with bugs of the same colour. These combinations make the bugs disappear and keep your log free for more bugs. The log that fills first is the loser. There are clear rules and you play against a background of lively jungle music.
As you would expect from Disney, the standard of animation is excellent and the characters are imaginative and very engaging. Children who love The Lion King will probably be quite at home playing games in the jungle with these two lovable cartoon characters. --Justin Hunt
Learning Ladder Year 4

Avanquest Software
Favourites Bob the Builder Can we Fix It?

Avanquest Software

Can We Fix It?. Of course we can, and with this BBC software package little builders will be better equipped than ever!. Featuring the chirpy Bob and his mechanical multitude of talented friends, this fun package is a mixture of educational encouragement and pure out-and-out fun.
Once loaded, you are invited to move the cursor around Wendy's office to select your tasks: hover over the phone, and it rings with a plumbing job; go near the fax, and a job comes in for Roley. Keep moving around, and you will find enough jobs to keep little fingers and minds busy for hours.
In "Hedgehog Rescue", the aim is firstly to help Lofty the Crane build a tunnel to save the scared hedgehogs from crossing the road. Children must match pipe shapes to tunnel shapes, and construct the route. The next, more difficult game, involves Wendy herding the hedgehogs into the tunnel--easier than it sounds, since one particularly persistent hedgehog seems unwilling to go.
In "Travis' Race Day", choose between Scoop or Dizzy to a head-to-head around an obstacle-strewn track. Guide your challenger by mouse or arrow keys--again, not as easy as it sounds, and a great developmental aid for hand-to-eye co-ordination.
"Can We Build It?" involves knocking down an unsafe bridge, then using colour recognition to match the bricks to rebuild it. Roley needs a hand with unruly tarmac in "Bubble Trouble", when you must guide him over the bubbles to even out the road. And in "Scary Spud", you must move Spud around the screen to scare off the crows. But the crowning glory is "Wendy's Birthday", where guests first decorate her cake then join in the fun line dancing. Also included on each game is "Where's Pilchard?", a hide-and-seek game for the shy, blue cat.
Accompanied throughout by Neil Morrisey's narration and the superb music from the TV show, (also now a CD single), this package builds on many elementary educational skills to make little builders into fully fledged Bobs. And while it is not that quick to load (missing plug-ins are provided, but it may take some time) it is well worth the wait.
Testers of around two years old found this package fun and evocative of their favourite TV character, though they did require constant supervision and most of the games were beyond mastering. This is a superb educational aid and lots of fun. (Suitable for ages 2 to 6).--Lucie Naylor
Learning Ladder: Year 3

Avanquest Software

Learning Ladder Year 3 is another excellent product from Dorling Kindersley. This CD-ROM is packed with a good range of activities tailored to support the Year 3 school curriculum. Children can navigate their way around the playroom, looking for fun activities. These include the printing machine, which they can use to create their own labels, invitations and cards.
Children can then improve their literacy, numeracy and science skills by undertaking a wide range of activities that help to consolidate Year 3 work. Children can, for example, choose correct word endings, solve addition and subtraction problems, label skeletons and identify correct habitats for animals. These are just a few of the carefully thought out and clearly explained activities here.
Children should be able to use this program independently. They are rewarded with stickers for each activity they complete correctly and will enjoy collecting these and putting them in their own sticker album.
Learning Ladder Year 3 would be an excellent buy for any Year 3 child. It consolidates the learning that is taking place at school and develops children's competence on the computer. --Amanda York
Disney Hotshots: (Toy Story 2: Cone Chaos/Toy Shelf Showdown, Arcade Frenzy: Mushoot/Rooftop Ruckus)

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Favourites: Pingu - A Barrel of Fun!

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BBC Toybox Compendium

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Bob the Builder: Bob Builds A Park

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BBC Balamory (2004)

Avanquest Software

What's the story in Balamory? Invite your kids to join Miss Hooly, Pocket & Sweet, PC Plum, Archie, Spencer and Edie Mcredie in virtual Balamory and they will learn as they play. Based on the popular BBC TV children's programme, the BBC Balamory CD-ROM opens with the colourful introductory song viewers know so well. Children are then presented with a variety of games to test basic pre-school and early years skills.
For younger children (3-4 years) the favourite will no doubt be Josie Jump's Hide and Seek game, where they must find Josie in a field of people, then click on her to make her jump. Equally rewarding for the smallest players is Spencer's Colour Challenge, where youngsters use basic mouse skills and number recognition to match colours with areas of the drawing--a kind of virtual colour by numbers.
All players will love Edie's Delivery Dilemma, which involves Pac-Man-like gameplay as youngsters work against the clock, using the arrow keys to direct Edie's bus around the town and picking up fruit dropped by the delivery van so that Pocket & Sweet can sell it in their shop. PC Plum Investigates asks children to sort through the evidence that is all mixed up on the policeman's desk, so he can sort out his cases--tasks such as "click on the things that are the same colour as the sea" make this game accessible to most players.
Slightly older children, (4-6 years) might like to try Archie's Word Wonder, where they must fill in the missing letters on words so that Archie's Word Machine can produce words for Miss Hooly's stories. The only criticism here is that words are sounded out by name only, and not phonetically, but otherwise this is a fun, testing game. Children of school age will also enjoy Pocket & Sweet's Shopping Spree--a fun shopping game that involves helping Penny and Susie put together all their orders, then adding up the cost at the end. If players tire at any point, they can take a break with one of six Miss Hooly stories.
The production quality is superb: colours are bright and images crisp and the clips from the show run perfectly. Each game is introduced and narrated by the corresponding character from the show, with original voiceovers, and the games are fun, educational and pitched perfectly at the target age-range. There are three difficulty levels for each task, to avoid frustration and aid development. Help is on offer on every screen, and children as young as three or four years old, who possess basic mouse skills, will be able to play the easier games unaided, and the others with assistance. Instructions are read out and printed on-screen, so children can follow as they listen, thus developing valuable reading skills. Great thought has obviously gone into matching characters with tasks, and the variety of games played and skills tested makes this a fantastic all-round package. --Lucie Naylor
BBC Playtime

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Bear & Penguin's Big Reading Adventure

Avanquest Software

Bear and Penguin's Big Reading Adventure is another excellent program developed by Dorling Kindersley. It is aimed at children aged 5-7 years old and helps to develop a wide range of literacy skills through four fun games.
There are very clear instructions and each game is initially demonstrated, so children will quickly be able to develop confidence and independence. The games, which can be played at three different levels, have been carefully developed to practice the skills that children are learning as part of the literacy hour in school; for example, spelling words by choosing the missing sounds and putting words in the correct order to create a sentence. There are also two storybooks that children can choose to read together or alone. If children want a break from the games there is also an excellent printing section where children can make their own stationary and create lists, cards, writing paper and signs. This is a brilliant way to encourage children to write for a range of different purposes.
As children play the games they collect snowflakes and they are then rewarded with a sticker for their sticker album. When all the stickers have been collected they can print out a certificate and listen to the reward song.
There is an excellent guide for parents that discusses the skills the games are developing. The child profile shows parents how many times children have played each game and at what level and also suggests follow-on worksheets that can be printed out and used with children.
Bear and Penguin's Big Reading Adventure would be an excellent buy for parents or teachers to use with children aged 5-7 years. --Amanda York
Dr Seuss Cat in the Hat

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Nickelodeon Toon Twister 3D

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Favourites Tweenies Ready to Play (2002)

Avanquest Software

Hey, hey, are you ready to play? It's time to come and play with the Tweenies software. Jake, Milo, Bella and Fizz are all waiting to improve your little one's writing, art, reading and listening skills, as well as develop early gaming talents.
Tick, Tock, Tweenie Clock, Where Will It Stop?
Immerse your youngster in the colourful and familiar Tweenies world, brilliantly represented in sound and graphics on your PC. Everyone will love "Messy Time", with the three different print and play games, as well as instructions on how to make finger puppets, masks, badges and spinners. Then there's "Doodles Mail"--write to the Tweenies via Doodles, receive a reply, and see little faces light up. Watch favourite characters during "Telly Time", and join in the action songs in "Song Time". "News Time" will test pre-school general knowledge and Tweenies trivia, while "Playtime" encourages early gaming skills with "Catch", "Flying Rocket" (an arcade-style game) and "Snap". Then, if you're sitting comfortably, there's the old faithful, "Story Time".
Clear, colourful and easy to use, the Tweenies software will appeal greatly to children from the age of three, but there's plenty to keep the five- and six-year-olds happy as well. Language development, numeracy, creativity, elementary computer skills and good old-fashioned fun are all encouraged, and the whole package is designed to support Key Stage 1 in English, Art, Maths and Information Technology. Whether you select your own activities, or let the Tweenie Clock pick at random, child appeal is absolutely guaranteed. Though simple in principle, all the games and learning activities have the repetitive quality toddlers love and thrive on. This is every bit as good as the TV show with one major advantage--it lasts much longer. --Lucie Naylor
BBC CBeebies Rubbadubbers (PC)

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