Customer Reviews

Dr. Seuss Cat in the Hat (Jewel Case)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a geat program. My husband bought the program when our daugter was about 4 months old and she just loved watching the book being read to her. Now she is about a year old and has to play the game every night before bed. It is a wonderful program, you can have the book read to you or you can choose to play on each of the pages. We are always finding somthing new on the pages. I just hope thay make one for The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

My 3 year old is a big fan of The Cat in The Hat so I was thrilled to find this software. While it's amusing both he and I were very quickly bored. The book is "read" to you and then you get to interact with the images on the page, but there are very few actual "games" and even those are uninteresting. Objects and characters move, speak or do silly things when you click on them but nothing is challenging or requires any thought. There are a few exceptions (on one page you can rearange a portrait on the wall, on another make the cat balance more items...) but it's just nothing interesting and there's not enough...

I bought this when my daughter was two years old. She continued to view it regularly for almost two years. There are a lot of different things for her to see on each screen, and it is very interactive. By clicking on the various items, Christina is rewarded with all kinds of surprises. We are still finding surprises that we weren't aware of previously! Highly recommend this!!

I first saw this software in my local library and immediately decided to get one for my 3 year old. The program is as good as I expected. It installs very easily, runs well, has some animation while reading with different voices for the characters. It is a fine job overall, and my son loves it. The whole story lasts 15 minutes, and so far he has spent an hour or two a day watching it without me prompting him. There is also a part of the program where one can click the items on the screen and make it do something, but my son doesn't know how to manipulate the mouse yet. I suspect he will enjoy it later. Considering the fact that the book itself costs around $7, 10 bucks for a whole CD doesn't seem out of line at all. There is one small drawback: there is no direct way to quit the program in the middle of the book -- no "Esc" or "F1" key can bail you out of there. I got out once by pressing the windows key and then close it in windows, which is not the proper way to close a program and I felt guilty doing it. They should have designed a way to quit at any time gracefully, I think, but this is not a big problem. Overall, I am very happy I bought it.

Have used Dr Suess books, especially Cat in the Hat, to teach English to young learners. With the animation and learning support offered by this excellent CD-rom, language development is readily stimulated. The children beg for it day after day!

I've spent a lot more on kids software that got a lot less use. My 3yo loves it and plays with it over and over again. He loves to show it to his friends, who are all extremely engaged. Terrific value.

I bought this CD-Rom a year ago, in preparation for my young son's inevitable interest in computers. I had no idea what it did, what games it had, etc. When my 4-year old son put it in the computer for the first time, I was blown away. It is so much more than the review indicates. This core of the disc is the Cat In The Hat story, but the level of interaction is awesome. On each page, you first hear/see the story. When the narrator is finished reading (or the characters are finished talking) on that page, you get to play. You can click on every single image on the page and it does something creative and entertaining. And not just the characters. I'm talking the floor, the doors, the window shades...even the stairs. Long after my son and I had started playing and I'd been through each page dozens (maybe hundreds) of times, he discovered new things to click on that were even more enteratining than those I'd shown him. For example, in the page showing Thing 1 and Thing 2 flying their kites in the hall, if you click on the stairs it starts moving like an escalator, mall "muzac" starts playing, and Thing 1 and Thing 2 appear on the escalator as shoppers, saying, respectively, "I've sure got a lot of things to return," and "I've sure got a lot of things to destroy." This program is absolutely darling, and you grown-ups won't mind being called over to the computer repeatedly when your little one announces, "Mom, look what happens when I click on the Cat's hat!"

In terms of age-range, it's perfect for a first-time exposure to computers, yet I believe it would appeal to older children as well. My son, who just turned 4, had never used a computer before, and yet in no time he was navigtating by himself and clicking on everything in sight. He even found out how to shut the program down before it ends, whereas I had been using control-alt-delete! At the same time, my boyfriend's 10-year old and his friends can't keep from looking over my son's shoulder and excitedly telling him to "click on the fish! click on the bed!"

Graphically, I don't have a lot of experience with this type of software, but the program is completely animated. It's not just static pictures of the story-book pages. The animation is along the lines of the 1971 Cat In The Hat Original TV Series DVD (which tells a different story, but is another must-have!).

Educationally, I can't give an opinion because my son hasn't started to read yet and isn't too interested in the words yet. But I do know that it seems to have the same abilities and features as Leap Pad books: it shows the written storybook as it narrates the animation, highlighting each word as it is read, and it repeats the words if your child clicks on them (with some funny variations).

All in all, a wonderful, entertaining program for both children and their parents who will endure its endless repetitions!

Crashes my computer on windows 7 and crashes intermittently on Windows XP.

Very disappointing for me and my kids.

I bought this for a birthday a few weeks ahead of time. Got the message from the seller that it was on its way and never received it. I emailed them and they later said they overlooked the email. Fine but when I finally got the disc a month later (of course the second came two days after that) it didn't work. Neither did the second. In all the mix up Amazon ended up crediting me before the discs came (I paid $5 with shipping), so no harm done. But it just so happens that I found another at a thrift store (again before the two others came) and it didn't work either(not because of scratches). Must be a whole lot of them out there that got recorded wrong.

I was hoping this was a review of service -- not product. I had to order this twice as it was sent to the wrong address in Camas. Where the wrong address came from, I don['t know. I did edit the previous address by changing from Ethan Barber to Sarah Barber, but the mailing address stayed the same as your previous mailings.