Description:
Curious George as a cub reporter--a professional match made in heaven! And this story-within-a-story approach goes beyond teaching reading, writing, and spelling skills. Kids who master this CD-ROM are well on their way to understanding structure and storytelling as they help write articles and watch Curious George's (mis)adventures unfold with each of the 12 activities. Whereas most CD-ROMs have a reference-book approach, where you open up to a table of contents and click straight to the good parts, Curious George Reads, Writes, and Spells opens up and envelops the player like a good storybook. If you get impatient and try to skip activities, the flow of the story becomes disjointed. The "book" begins with Curious George and his friend bringing Lola, the talking parrot, to The Curious Times; they think Lola would make a great story for the newspaper. Ace reporter Hildy Hawkins agrees, but has to scurry away to cover another big story. Curious George can't resist letting Lola out of her cage, and the parrot escapes. As George and his friend chase Lola around town, they disrupt sign painters, distract construction workers, and even manage to get some stories assigned to them by a beleaguered-looking newspaper editor. This plot has 12 twists in all, and each of these plot elements is accompanied by a reading, writing, or spelling game. One of our favorites was a sly reference to Donkey Kong, where George must scale steel girders and avoid I-beams to pluck letters hanging from a construction site and use them to spell words. As the story builds to a chaotic climax and then wraps up with a final activity, there's a nice feeling of completeness. This wonderful CD-ROM won't just teach kids how to write--it may teach them how to write well. (Ages 5 to 8) --Anne Erickson
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