Little Bear Rainy Day Activities (Jewel Case)

The CD starts with Mother Bear calling Little Bear into the house when it starts to rain, and quickly switches to the activity selection screen. There is: 1) cooking -- adding ingredients to a bowl, cutting out shapes, and decorating cookies; 2) costumes -- drag-and-dropping various costume pieces and props onto Little Bear, Duck, Cat, Owl or Hen; 3) painting -- using a variety of colors and fill patterns to color any of six different scenes; 4) stickers -- drag-and-dropping characters and props onto various scenes (campsite, garden, bedroom, picnic, boat or house); 5) puzzles -- drag-and-drop 4, 6 or 9 pieces onto a template; 6) matching -- finding pairs of characters' pictures amid a layout of 8 or 12 "cards".

An activity section has 27 projects which can be printed out. These include recipes (such as fizzy lemonade and gingerfriends cookies), games (sound bingo and finger puppets, for instance) and arts & crafts projects (vegetable stamps and making a water xylophone among them). There are enough activities to keep a child interested for a long time, and activities sometimes have different levels of difficulty, such as the number of puzzle pieces or matching cards, so they can be ofinterest to children of different ages. At any point you can print scenes in one of three formats -- a color picture, a coloring book-style line drawing, or a greeting card), and printing has been without bugs.

Running this on a PowerMac G4, installation was quick and easy. The only weak point is the booklet, which contains nothing but installation instructions.

Recommended for ages 3 and up, but younger children will enjoy it if you operate the mouse for them.

This is a terrific product, and I endorse it without reservation.

Dressing Little Bear up in costumes is very fun and inspires creativity. Cooking - you drop ingredients into a bowl and mix them up, cut out shapes and decorate cookies is one of of my son's favorite activities on this CD. This develops prereading skills and following directions. There are other activities: Coloring, matching, puzzles and a sticker type activity. All the activities inspire creativity and other skills such as pre reading skills, following directions, and more. Further there are print up activities you can print up and do in your own home. What a great idea.

The characters are cute and the voices sound just like the ones on the show. The loading time is reasonable for each game and the games are fun.

My son is three and enjoys this CD. I can see this being a CD that will be enjoyed for several more years.

Enjoy.