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Just Grandma and Me
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Just Grandma and Me
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Summary |
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Just Grandma and Me is an interactive re-telling of the children's story of the same name by Mercer Mayer. Each page of the book has been beautifully animated. Children have a choice of having the story read to them, or browsing each page and clicking to discover the cute animations or amusing sounds. This is a beautiful title and is ideal for young children - either for entertainment, or as an introduction to using a mouse or to help them to learn to read. Since the CD supports English, Spanish and Japanese, it's a great way to introduce a foreign language. |
Educational
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Just Grandma and Me promotes several different types of learning skills. For early readers it reinforces basic reading skills (you can click on a word and it will be read to you, or as it reads the sentences, it highlights the individual words or phrases. For the very young, it helps improve their listening skills and it teachs them about "cause and effect " (I click here with the mouse and something happens there on the screen). Later, it will aid in basic reading skills. In the meantime in encourages exploration. |
Fun Factor |
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This is a beautiful title that my son enjoyed immensely between the ages of 2 and 4. He was continually surprised by many of the animations and sounds. Even after many hours of enjoyment, we'd occasionally find a new animation that we hadn't seen before. |
Lasting Value |
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Not only did my son enjoy the CD-ROM, he began to enjoy looking at the book version. With the many pages and many animations on a page, we had many hours of enjoyment with it. The duration of each session depends upon your child's attention span, but my son at age 2 could play with it for 15 to 20 minutes at a time. I expect that he will come back to this one later when he begins to read. |
Quality |
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The design is very rich, with many clever and some unexpected animations using a wide range of sound effects and music themes. The animations are quite cute and appropriate for young children. The interface is very consistent and very user friendly. It is a "point and click" interface. While it is easy for an adult to exit the program, it is not as easy for a very young child, so you can leave them alone while playing (for a little while) and not worry about them going off and erasing your hard disk. |
Check This Out |
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Don't forget to click on the clouds, sky and water in many scenes. While there may not be an obvious object there to click on, there is often an animation that shouldn't be missed. This is one of the few titles that is multi-lingual. You can select either English, Japanese or Spanish language versions at the start, or by pressing keys 1 (English), 2 (Japanese) or 3 (Spanish) while a screen is loading. (My son discovered this accidently) Some have used this feature to introduce the concept of a second language, or for bilingual education. Tech support told us that in the Macintosh version, by hitting "command space-bar", the menu bar appears, giving access to the Apple menu. This allowed me to get to the sound control panel so I could adjust the sound level from within the program. If you set up the program in "read to me" mode, it advances from page (i.e. screen) to page automatically and children can be told the story from beginning to end (this feature is a good for "babysitting" when you need it). Or you can start the program on any page, by selecting "Options" at the start of the program. This works well if your child spends a long time on the first few pages and grows tired of them sp you want to begin another session at a later page. |
Learn to read with Little Critter and his Grandma!
In this endearing story, Little Critter and his Grandma spend a day at the beach, where Little Critter rides a windblown umbrella, fends off a nasty crab, goes snorkeling, and much more!
Key Features and Benefits:| Product | Description | Order |
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Arthur's Teacher Troubles |
Arthur suddenly finds himself representing his third grade class in the school wide spellathon. If he can't spell a certain 11-letter word correctly, he'll be in big T-R-O-U-B-L-E! Ages 6 - 10. This is based on the book of the same name by Marc Brown. |
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| Title | Author |
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| Just Me and My Dad | by Mercer Mayer |
| The New Baby | by Mercer Mayer |