With Sesame Street Preschool, children learn while playing with Ernie and Bert, Elmo, and Zoe. Kids explore 16 learning activities accessed from the main menu of five brightly colored blobs. The blobs represent different learning categories.
From the yellow blob kids can play games involving colors, shapes, and other sorting attributes. In one activity, as the screen fills with kid-appealing objects, Ernie asks players to click on objects that have certain attributes. In another, kids can make up sentences by choosing pictures and shapes. The software reads the sentence aloud and acts it out as an animated movie. This well-done activity shows preschoolers how words make up sentences; and, while they may not be able to yet read, it empowers them to create silly sentences.
The green blob leads children to activities that teach the letters of the alphabet, word families, and letter sounds. With the magenta blob, kids explore numbers, number order, counting, the number line, and adding. The orange blob has six movies from the “Sesame Street” segment known as “The People in Your Neighborhood,” and the pink blob focuses on art.
The muppets are darling and entertaining; although they are overly wordy at times. Unlike Pencil-Pal Software Preschool which only drills academic topics, Sesame Street Preschool actually teaches kids early learning concepts such as counting. The software presents carefully sequenced activities that explain a concept, and the muppets are programmed to offer lots of help and clues along the way. The games even automatically level to adjust as the child’s abilities change.
All tech products are judged on a five star scale by looking at the following factors: fun, education, ease of use, value, and technical.
