Disney's Mickey Mouse Preschool with Active Leveling Advantage

by Disney

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00004THNQ
• Item model number: 1963901
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 4, 2000
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,508 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

You can practically smell the burger grease and freshly hung laundry at this funky little diner that Mickey and Minnie Mouse visit when their gas tank falls below "E." As a banjo plunks out a slow tune in the background, Mickey pulls up a chair and sits outside with Pluto to enjoy the sunshine. No agenda here. Instead of explaining what kids should do next, Mickey scratches Pluto and occasionally glances toward the cursor. This is the CD-ROM equivalent of a deliciously lazy summer day with nothin' urgent to do. Kids play and learn at their own pace, by nosing around and figuring things out.

Mosey into the garage. One bay houses a body shop where you can piece together and paint custom hot rods; the other, a tune-up place where a swipe of the cursor creates actual tunes on musical wrenches, tires, and hubcaps. Follow Minnie into the diner, and Daisy Duck dishes up dozens of workbook-style exercises on place mats. Wander into the back yard, and Huey, Dewy, and Louie hand you a hose and tell you which letters, numbers, shapes, or colors to squirt. Help pump gas and learn color mixing, numbers, and how to follow instructions. Get it wrong and a chipper customer intones, "That wasn't quite right, but it'll do," as their car backfires and leaves in a cloud of smoke.

Our favorite activity was the Opposites Car: climb into a car, and "mouse" with the turn signals, windshield wipers, and other fun switches preschoolers aren't allowed to touch on Mommy and Daddy's car. It's a clever way to teach opposites, and it's great fun to honk the horn and make Uncle Donald drop his laundry. (Ages 2 to 4) --Anne Erickson

Product Description

Building Block for Preschool SuccessProduct FeaturesDisney's Mickey Mouse Preschool is set in a funky 50's style roadside diner just off a busy highway.  It's a fascinating and inviting world for your child to explore full of hustle and bustle.  There's a diner a workshop and body shop gas pumps and even an old car upon blocks.Preschoolers will explore a supportive learning environment in a roadside pit-stop off the highway near Mickey's home.  While interacting with Mickey and his friends kids are learning about 123's ABC's colors and shapes and other age appropriate skills.  Disney's Mickey Mouse Preschool is filled with activities that build self-confidence by means of continuous positive reinforcement from Mickey and his friends.Skills LearnedLetter RecognitionNumber RecognitionEarly ReadingPhonicsCountingMath ReadinessMatchingMusic AppreciationEarly Music ConceptsOppositesListening SkillsStrategic ThinkingCause and EffectObservationComputer Mouse SkillsKey BenefitsThe active learning philosophy seeks to make learning fun and interesting by allowing children to exercise creativity while mastering key skills.  There is an emphasis on exploration and discovery.  Children learn an activity by playing it without needing elaborate instructions.  There are opportunities to develop problem-solving skills that will equip children to be lifelong learners.  Full of humor and surprise the activities engage the child and allow him/her the power of choice.  The Mickey Mouse Learning series uses active learning principles to stimulate learning in an entertaining and positive environment.Different children have varying abilities at different ages. In addition a particular child's development can change radically in a short time. Disney's Learning Series dynamically and intuitively adjusts to the abilities of the child playing the game so that it is fun and not frustrating for the 2 y

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Software User, January 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Disney's Mickey Mouse Preschool with Active Leveling Advantage (CD-ROM)

My child loves this program. The game starts by having the child type in their name then click the play button. Then you see Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto driving down the road when the car makes a sound-they are out of gas. So they stop at a gas station, where goofy, daisy, donald, and his nephews happen to be. So Mickey and pluto sit and wait while Minnie goes inside the diner to visit Daisy. After that you can go into one side of the garage where goofy is making the cars. My daughter loves this one. You choose how you want it to look, you can paint it, change tires. Then you can also print it out. The other garage is a musical making garage with tires, cans, wrenches, etc. Outside is a car that you can sit in and touch all the buttons, etc. You can also help fill up cars with yellow, orange, red, green, purple, blue gas up to 20 gallons. The driver tells you what they want(6 gallons of red gas) and you press the buttons and it counts to six. My daughter loves this one too. Then you can use a hose to squirt down cans and laundry with huey, duey, and luey. They teach numbers, colors, and shapes. The nice thing about this program is that you can enter and exit each one pretty fast. This is a lot better than the Winnie the Pooh Preschool program. Much easier for the child to understand in my oppinion and holds their attention better. As for the program not being able to work with certain computers and hardware, that is wrong. My husband does this stuff for a living and we have not had one problem with it. We have a brand new computer and a one year old one and both disney programs loaded fast and easy with no problems. It must be user error. I highly recommend this to anyone, even an adult, it is that much fun.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great graphics, December 7, 2000

By 

"jaclynns-mom" (Warrenton, Virginia United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disney's Mickey Mouse Preschool with Active Leveling Advantage (CD-ROM)

This one won't create an Einstien in your family but it is fun to play-if you can get it to work! It would only load on my 5 year old (and painfully slow) computer. Apparently it is only compatible with the old DirectX version that Disney uses. Some of the games have plain old silly fun like designing and painting a car in Goofy's garage and playing with the controls up front like the wipers, etc. There is a matching/squirt gun game with Huey, Dewey and Louie. Daisy's Diner offers some nice games with pattern recognition. There's another game for listening skills and numbers. If your kids are big Minnie or Mickey fans, they may be a little disappointed because you don't see much of them. Overall, the game has nice variety and great graphics. I suspect Jaclynn will bore with this one fairly early on, though because there are no levels of play to adjust and it is not very challenging.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Confusing, boring, minimally educational, October 11, 2001

By 

Dennis G. Pratt "jnkpratt" (Westwood, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Disney's Mickey Mouse Preschool with Active Leveling Advantage (CD-ROM)

My 2.5 daughter loves her Reader Rabbit Toddler and accepts her Jumpstart Toddler. She is comfortable playing both RR and JS 1-2 hours. So I bought this thinking it would be a good next step. I was disappointed. She does not enjoy it and will spend no more than 15 minutes with it.

-- Stupid cartoon uninterruptible. Slows everything down without giving anything new. RR has a cartoon that was interesting the first few times, but we regularly interrupt it now.

-- Characters not involved in interaction. There is a car whose horn you can press (whoo, whoo). That is a high point!

-- Too much emphasis on artwork, little on interaction.

-- Concluding credits uninterruptible. Just try interrupting this computer hog to quickly get something off your computer for a phone call.

Very disappointing.

I think the section where you water-spray the letter, number, color, shape will be beneficial, however, the goal of the exercise is not clear for younger children, and quickly becomes boring. I can think of hundreds of ways to make it more interesting. Where were these guys?

The musical and spray-paint sections are a good start, but they give up so quickly.

And god forbid that you don't cntrl-P to turn off the printer. If you leave your child with the printer on, you won't have any paper and your child happily prints the large button to print out worksheets, again and again. It's rare to want to print, why is this such a large button.

And one of the worst features is that the exit is fairly large and central. So you go into an area, put up with the uninterruptible cartoon, the child starts to play, and boom!, she accidentally hits the exit. (RR for example has a delay that helps the child decide not to exit.)