Just Grandma and Me
© 1997 The Learning Company
This revised version of Just Grandma and Me (first released in 1992) remains one of the better electronic storybooks. The story is the same. A boy and his grandmother spend a day at the beach. They ride the bus, eat hot dogs, go snorkeling and look for seashells. With this new version, a tool bar appears at the bottom of each screen, letting kids hear the story in French, Spanish or German. Children can also select from two activities. Play in the Sand lets kids do just that, making sand castles using buckets, shells, flags and stones. Testers found the tools hard to manipulate at first, but were able to make castles after a few attempts. The castles can be printed but unfortunately cannot be saved. Another flaw— when kids are done with the activity they have to go back to the opening screen instead of the page they were reading beforehand. Our testers frequently used the Sticker option (the second activity) available on each page of the story. When this option is activated, some of the objects disappear from the page's illustration and are displayed in a panel to the left. Children then click and drag each object from the panel to the appropriate space in the picture. As the object is highlighted, its name is read aloud so that early readers can see the object, hear its name pronounced and learn the spelling of the word. Even on fast computers, we found the transitions between screens to be quite slow. We were also disappointed to find that the animations and narration are still not interruptible, decreasing the level of child-control. On the whole, however, the story is as engaging as ever, and the new activities add to the program's value.
$13, Win 95, Win 3.1, Mac OS (CD-ROM)
Teaches: early reading, French, German, Spanish