Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree

$34.95, Windows CD-ROM, Mac CD-ROM

Teaches: a language experience in English or Spanish

CTR Review

Young Winnie the Pooh fans will initially enjoy this 18 screen story of Pooh and his quest for honey. Featuring clear graphics, original narration and orchestrated music, the story contains a mixture of about 100 clickables, games and videos hidden in the illustrations. By moving the bee-shaped cursor around the screen and clicking, children can discover a variety of clever, animated musical routines, or hear a word from the text spoken by the narrator. Other features allow for easy toggling between English and Spanish (just press the L key), and a sliding bar menu makes it easy to get to any page, activity, or song. Despite the quality of the story elements, our testers found the pacing of the program to be slow, and the four games limited. In a butterfly catching game, for example, children are asked to help Roo catch passing butterflies by clicking on them. Each time they click, they hear a reinforcement message that cannot interrupted, such as "you're a good helper," or "that one got away", bogging down efforts to catch the next butterfly. This need for faster pacing, more child control, and greater challenge holds true throughout. In all, this program makes a good first impression with its wonderful music and graphics, but overdoes the reinforcers and musical routines at the expense of child-control. We would expect to see greater responsiveness and depth in the activities.