Disney Interactive has bundled several of their early learning titles and released them under the Disney Learning label. Each bundle contains three games. Disney Learning Toddler consists of Mickey Mouse Toddler, Winnie the Pooh Toddler, and Rolie Polie Olie.
Winnie the Pooh Toddler is a gentle introduction to mouse skills for toddlers, that teaches ABCs, numbers, colors, shapes, opposites, logical thinking skills and Spanish and French words with five activities. All activity is accomplished by either mouse clicking, mouse roll-over and hitting any key on the keyboard.
Kids will have the most fun with Popping Balloons with Pooh, a delightful game where kids pop balloons labeled with either colors, shapes, numbers or ABCs to drop one of the 100 Acre characters from the sky onto the safe ground, and Who Likes To? an equally charming game which asks children to pick the correct character who likes something in particular, which is demonstrated by the characters before the question is asked. The other activities include an opposites game, a sing-along session, a somewhat lame foreign language activity and a cute printables section.
Mickey Mouse Toddler is also a gentle introduction to mouse skills, which goes one step further - the other activities are always accessible from any one activity because they're displayed at the top of every screen, and can be activated by just letting the mouse stay on any one for a time. Again, movement is accomplished by mouse roll-over, mouse clicking and hitting any key on the keyboard.
There are five activities, and all of them are really fun. Letters play peek-a-boo with users at Mickey's ABCs, where letters are hiding around the outside of Mickey's house, and have to be clicked on to come out of hiding. At Pluto's 123s, pesky gophers have snatched Pluto's chew toy numbers, and he has to bark at them to startle them into dropping them. Other games include Goofy's Colors, a creativity area where kids can change the appearance of Goofy's house, Minnie's Shapes, where Minnie asks kids to click on items with specific shapes around the outside of her house, and Donald's Noisemaker, a cute musical activity.
Rolie Polie Olie features the popular young robot from Playhouse Disney. Here, kids will explore Olie's house looking for his dog Spot, so he can give him a bath. There are four games that focus more on free exploration and creativity, than educational games. These include the Telly Builder game, where furniture is placed into the correct shapes to make interesting machines, the Canister Can-Can game, a wacky musical activity, the Crayon Crisscross game, a color matching game, and the Scuba Splash game, a simple arcade type game where kids collect items knocked into Spot's tub.
Each of these games, while including several excellent activities that encourages toddlers to explore and learn, suffers from just not having enough variety in their games as standalone programs, especially Winnie the Pooh Toddler, which really only has three decent activities, as the foreign language activity is poorly made, and the music in the song section isn't very catchy. However, combining them together in this bundle offers nineteen activities, almost all of which are very well-designed, plus two good printable sections, for twenty bucks! The only drawback is having to switch CDs frequently.
An excellent addition to any toddler and preschool software library!
