Disney Learning Kindergarten

Amazon.com Product Description:
Disney Learning Kindergarten, featuring Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, is an early-learning tool that enables children to learn age-appropriate skills with their favorite Disney characters. Whether your child is investigating Main Street for newspaper cover stories with Mickey or attending school in the Hundred Acre Wood, he or she will learn important skills that enhance memory, observation, and listening. Other exercises help young children gain experience with the alphabet, simple arithmetic, and problem solving.

disappointing kindergarten software:
After using Disney Interactive's Phonics Quest, which I think is the best of the dozen-or-so titles of early-elementary-school-age software I've tried, I looked forward to using the Kindergarten software from the same vendor. However, my five-year-old and I were immediately frustrated. To start with, if your default disk for Windows is anything other than c:, this software crashes. That's an indication of badly-engineered code. But it isn't just attention to detail to software engineering that makes this program a bust. The way that the kid interacts with it is confusing and boring. It comes nowhere close to matching the interest generated by the other three kindergarten titles we've tried: Reader Rabbit Kindergarten, Arthur's Kindergarten, and even the very sleepy but serviceable older title from Disney, "Winnie the Pooh Kindergarten". My child will never ask to use this product again, I'm sure. A complete disappointment.

A Disney Dud!:
We were very dissapointed in this game. Many of the activities are exactly the same and my child quickly tired of them. To earn "rewards" she had to answer so many questions (more than I could sit through) that she wanted to move on before completing the task. We would recommend the Jumpstart series instead.

Sadly I agree with the other 1-star reviews:
Visually it looked like it was going to be a great game/learning tool. The difficulty stars at the bottom were a nice touch. But the repetitiveness of the exercises was awful. I will have to try some of the other recommendations.

Good for 4 year olds:
My daughter has been playing this game since she was three. It was a little difficult for her at that age but she stuck with it. Now at almost six she loves playing it and asks to play it several times a week. It has helped her with problem solving, early reading, and math skills. It's more than I expected from a game. I'm running it on Windows 2000 Professional.