Man. I need to do a review on something I hate. I’ve been giving lots of four and five smiley face reviews lately. Ah well. I suppose that’s a good thing.
ANYWAY. Chowder is a cartoon airing on the Cartoon Network (apt, eh?) for anyone aged six and up who has a sense of humor. And when I say “sense of humor” let me put that into perspective for you: If you think that Jay Leno is consistently fall-on-the-floor HILLARIOUS, then you do not have a sense of humor. You have a sense of “ha.”
Team Umizoomi is a new show aimed at preschoolers that airs on the Nickelodeon networks. Rather than focusing on language or behavior, as so many preschool educational shows do, Team Umizoomi focuses on math by way of mostly geometry, size relationships, patterns and occasionally number concepts like temperature.
Living in a college town has its advantages. The University of Kansas plays Saturday night movies in the Woodruff auditorium in the Student Union that students may see for the bargain basement price of $1, and the general public may see for just $3. A couple of Saturdays ago, the Union was showing Disney’s newest ‘princess’ movie, The Princess and the Frog.
I know I haven’t specifically stated that I’d review websites anywhere on this blog, but as a modern parent, I’m well aware of the pluses of occasionally letting your kid mess around on the computer. Sometimes, it’s just the thing to occupy a fussy toddler or young kid.
Recently, I had the opportunity to check out www.wiggletime.com, a relatively new site that’s being touted as a “virtual world” for preschool kids. My 7-year-old daughter helped me explore the site. Her conclusion? She’d give the site five smiley faces out of five, two thumbs up and an “Excellent!”
I think it’s a pretty good site as well.
First off, the site has some features available for free, but the bulk of the benefit of the site is reaped when you pay for a subscription. Families have the option to pay $5.95 once for a one-month subscription; $5.35 per month for six months, or $60 for the year. You also have the option to pay for a UNICEF subscription, which is a bit higher, but a portion of your subscription money goes to UNICEF and even more secret games are made available to your child.
If you opt to go with the free subscription, your child will be able to move around the entire site and will have access to some of the videos, but none of the games. If your child is 3 or 4 years old and loves the Wiggles, they’ll have a great time just wandering around the site, driving around in the big red car, visiting Wags and Dorothy and Captain Feathersword and all the Wiggles. But if your child is 5 or older and is a hardcore Wiggles fan, I think that he or she is going to become frustrated in not being able to access the games. There are TONS of coloring pages and activity sheets that can be printed from the site, whether or not you opt to pay for a subscription.
If you do decide to pay for a subscription, the site does have several nice amenities. Parents can set “activity breaks” that pop up every few minutes while your child is playing and remind him or her to get up and move around. The site will even open up a Wiggles video for your kid to sing and dance along to. In addition, the games and activities on the site are all meant to be educational, and the site will generate a monthly report to let you, the parent, know which activities your child has been accessing on the site. Finally, the site says that it will update its videos frequently, so your kid isn’t stuck watching the same videos over and over.
Another of the perks of the site is that there are ZERO advertisements, unlike the Nickelodeon.com and Disney.com sites which are almost always blasting advertisements at you that you have to hunt down and turn off.
When the Wiggletime.com site is loading a game or activity, a sort of stringed instrument pops up on the screen that your kid can add or subtract notes from. While my daughter loved this little application, the noise from it REALLY got on my nerves after awhile.
Also, even though we chose the language designation as the “Americas” when setting up my child’s avatar, there were still British spellings of words on the site, most notably the word “colour,” which pops up all over the place. (Apparently, that’s how the Canadians spell it.) Still, with as big as the American market has been for the Wiggles, I’m surprised they didn’t make a separate section of the site just for us Yanks. The British spelling of “colour” doesn’t bother me, but I know parents who would be bothered exposing their learning-to-read kids to alternate spellings of common words, especially if they’d paid for a subscription.
My daughter really enjoyed the games and activities on the site. I thought they were okay, but mostly on-par with some of the free games you can access at Nickelodeon.com. However, if your child is a big-time Wiggles fan and the subscription fee isn’t a hardship for your household, then I think it’s probably well worth it for your family to consider subscribing to Wiggletime.com.
The Backyardigans is an animated show airing on the Nickelodeon networks that is aimed at kids aged two to five or six years old. It stars five creatures who are kids, three boys and two girls. There's Pablo the blue penguin; Tyrone the orange moose; Uniqua, who I've always thought of as a pink dinosaur; Tasha the yellow hippopotamus and Austin, a purple kangaroo.
Much like the variety of brightly colored puppets and monsters on Sesame Street, the creature-kids are meant to be representative of the melting pot that is the U.S. The premise of the show is that the kids meet in their backyards to play, always acting out a specific scenario that they spontaneously agree on. Once they’re into their play, the backyard scene melts away, revealing a new world created in the kids’ imaginations. The Backyardigans might be cowboys or explorers. They might travel through the dessert or to a volcano.
The CGI animation is not only easy on the eyes, but extremely well done. The plots are interesting and original, with whimsical twists.
Here’s where I’m going to get myself into trouble. Apparently the creator of the Backyardigans, Janice Burgess, prides herself on the show’s songs and dances, which encompass a plethora of genres and dance styles, and require a lot of work from choreographers and writers. These musical segments almost always earn high praise from parents and reviewers, including a review on IMDB.com that describes the songs in the Backyardigans as “Broadway caliber.”
But I just don’t care for them. To me, they seem more like time killers or fillers than anything else. Then again, I can admittedly be a grump, so I decided to get the opinion of a kid and recently asked my seven year old if she liked the songs in the Backyardigans. (In, I assure you, a completely neutral tone.) “No,” she said. “I just like the episodes.”
So, maybe the aversion to the Backyardigans music sequences is just a wacky gene that runs in our family. I dunno.
I’ve also always thought it was ironic that here we are, watching kids playing outside and using their imaginations when really, our kids should be outside playing and using their imaginations rather than watching a television show about it. But then, that’s more due to our failings as parents than the fault of the show, right? Besides, sometimes the weather is bad or there’s not time to go and play outside before school.
The fact is that the Backyardigans is a high-caliber show that you can enjoy with your kid(s). Our family just has to suffer through the musical interludes.
Oh, and incidentally, there are several really great Backyardigans video games on the Nickelodeon web site. Some are free and some you have to pay for, but they’re all really well tailored to younger kids.
