If your kids enjoy “Sesame Street”, they’ll love School Zone Interactive’s Alphabet Express. This award-winning CD-ROM, for early learners ages 3 through 6 years, is the best comprehensive, interactive alphabet recognition program I’ve seen.
Alphabet Express is humorous, educational and fun-filled and goes to the head of the class for its high-quality animation and exciting activities for preschool and kindergarten age kids. Its approach to learning letters with great graphics and animated scenes reminds me of “Sesame Street” with an interactive twist!
Although the CD-ROM is fairly memory intensive (requiring 8 MB memory and 15 MB available hard drive for Windows and 8 MB memory and 4-15 MB available hard drive for Mac), its interface is seamless and its content is incredible.
Great graphics and animation combine with a good mix of audio and wacky sound effects for a sensational animated journey. Kids board the Alphabet Express train and are thrilled to find that each letter of the alphabet has its very own destination to explore.
The colorful main screen consists of upper and lower case letters of the alphabet while an animated train does laps around the letters waiting for your child to click on a letter.
Kids can play with colorful cartoon animal characters and are asked to find all of the letters in each picture that starts with the letter that they selected. The scene is full of animals and hidden clickables, and when a child clicks on a “hot spot”, the word is pronounced aloud and it transforms into a flawless animation. Giggles and grins from the kids give this activity a big two thumbs up!
There are three different coloring activities for each letter, where kids can use an simple paintbrush and dip it into 18 colors for some coloring fun. This adds up to a whopping number of coloring book pages to color on-screen or print out!
One of the coloring activities includes a picture to color with upper and lowercase letters on a lined page.I was excited that I had finally found an activity for kids which helps them learn how to write and trace letters of the alphabet (with directional arrows included)! Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. Although kids can color the picture on the computer, the letters were made to be printed for an away from the computer activity.
Each letter has its own hilarious firehouse game where kids click on an object that matches its letter. It’s a great way to reinforce the names of objects they’ve learned in the other activities. Timmy, age 5, got a kick out of watching the fire dog climb a ladder to help an elephant put out a fire!
That’s not all! There are plenty of easy-to-find activities including 10 multi-level Dot-to-Dot games (with 60 different ways to connect the dots) which reinforce alphabet order and helps kids develop sequencing skills and upper and lower case letter recognition; an alphabet song play area; a movie theater with two hilarious mini-movies; 15 fantastic Mazes where kids navigate around animal barriers blocking the paths and learn how to solve problems; Hidden Letters games, also multi-level, where kids can search through 10 different pictures to find the hidden letters and more. A comprehensive Parents Guide is also included in the CD-ROM which lets you customize the program for your child.