Description:
Based on the popular PBS television show, Zoboomafoo Animal Alphabet takes kids on a guided tour of their ABCs, allowing them to brush up early reading and spelling skills while learning about animals from the Kratt brothers and their leaping lemur friend. An educational activity center for children in the 3 to 6 years age range, this game offers a variety of simple minigames designed to build alphabet knowledge by capitalizing on a young player's curiosity about the animal kingdom. Users can color animal flash cards or play an arcade-style round of Penguin Pong, bouncing ice floes off each other to reveal the answer to a quiz question. Alternately, they can go to Animal Mixups, a top-notch activity where kids mix and match animals, grafting a zebra head, to take one possibility, onto a tiger torso, perhaps with a cow or reindeer tail to finish. As an extra bonus, play is interspersed with lengthy live-action sequences from the television program. A win in one of the spelling games triggers a shot of the Kratt brothers going face-first into a mud pit. The Kratts and Zoboomafoo the leaping lemur also host a collection game, where players seek out animals whose names start with the different letters of the alphabet, and then get to see video footage of the creature itself. Animal lovers and fans of the show should enjoy Zoboomafoo Animal Alphabet thoroughly, especially if they have never seen a game of this type before. More experienced players may recognize that about half of its activities are standard fare, reworked versions of games that appear repeatedly in educational software. This is the only complaint to be made, though, with what is otherwise a completely engaging game with lots of fascinating animal facts and great potential for teaching young learners some basic reading skills. (Ages 3 to 6) --Alyx Dellamonica
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