Smarty Ants

$30, Windows, Mac OSX

Teaches: reading, phonics

CTR Rating: 82%

CTR Review

Put a phonics teacher inside your preschooler's plush toy, with Smarty Ants, a $30 talking dog designed to teach early reading essentials. Borrowing from the Webkinz model, the $30 toy comes with one month of free content (a code is included) that gives your child access to a clumsily-designed virtual world, called Smarty Ants Reading World (designed by Two Fish). Once you've setup your child's account, they can steer an avatar representation of their dog inside the world, take a pre-test, and play games. You can then adjust the content inside the plush toy to your child's level, by plugging it into your computer with the included USB plug and customizing the level. This all sounds good in theory, but in reality, we found the process to take over an hour, with a painful setup process that included 2 GB of hard drive space, and several crashes when running on a Macintosh. Strengths are the curriculum, which is straight out of an early reading workbook, using short, simple words in the context of games and songs that make the drill fun. It's as if somebody poured a few episodes of Sesame Street or The Electric Company into this dog's soul. Squeeze a paw and you get a dose of the phonics songs. The downside with this is that the stories -- consisting of words like mat, ant, camp and ramp are devoid of meaning. This approach has been criticized by proponents of whole language, however, the virtual world is full of opportunities to practice letter and word sounds. Still, the entire experience is informal, and your child can always switch the dog to the "off" position, for a quiet hug. The good news is that if your child decides to keep playing, you can then choose to pay the subscription price: roughly $6/month (or $50/6 months). Currently there are two animals -- a white dog and a husky. Both have a moving mouth and robotic neck. The sound is clear. Powered by three AA batteries (included).