Customer Reviews

Mia's Reading Adventure: The Search For Grandma's Remedy

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I bought this for my daughter when she turned 4 as she was already starting to learn to read. It took her a little while to follow the story and find the clues (I helped her with that). Once she had that figured out, it became her favorite computer game. She loves all the games, they were challenging but not too difficult for her on level 1 (there are 5 or 6 levels as I recall). She has since moved on to more difficult levels and still really enjoys it 1.5 years later. If your child is great at exploring computer programs and seeking for objects and clues this is an excellent reading program that won't bore them. If your child doesn't enjoy the "search," the games are still very much worth the money. I should also mention that the little cd-rom book that comes with it tells you exactly where to find everything for those who get frustrated with the search.

Finally, a program that caters to girls instead of just boys. Well, boys can play this too, but i find it very female friendly. My daugthers love it and fight over who gets to use it. My littlest is really shy and was having problems in kindergarten and afraid to ask for help. Now, she is starting to get the hang of spelling and feels so confident about it and always wants to play with Mia. We tried reader rabbit kindergarten as well but I found it wasn't effective as it didn't keep her attention long enough to start understanding the educational concepts. I will definitely recommend this for all parents who want to reinforce the basics of reading and writing.

The creators of Mia's Reading Adventure would be better engaged creating movies and not children's games. There is just way too much expository and not enough interaction to make this worth your child's effort. If you're looking to teach your pre-k/k child reading skills I'd recommend the Blue's Clues games instead. Any older children would probably get as frustrated as mine did.

this item was bought for a friend's grandaughter after purchasing the math software of the same character. Her reading level has improved since using this program. We're hoping more of Mia's software will be available for other subjects. I recommend the Mia series for young children to help them increase their reading and math skills.

I bought this game in hopes of adding a good repertoire of word play and phonetic computer activities to my child's reading activities. What I got was aimless wandering and a watered down version of an adventure game.

Those who say that this game is outstanding are surely misleading the public.

My concerns with this game:

The introductions are long and there is no way to skip them. The folks who developed this game were so enamored by their own handiwork that there IS an option to view the exceptionally long introduction on its own just in case you would like to watch it over and over again--Nothing to do with reading.

If you want to opt out of the storybook adventure part of the game and move from just activity to activity, you may! You will, however, find, to your dismay, that each activity is never a new game. Once you've done it--you've seen it! I was floored. For example: My daughter and I opened the "Scary Spider" activity under the second level, it was a letter scramble theme where you were to choose from seven letters combinations that would form words. When you had successfully made five short words from the scramble, Scary scares the cat. Wonderful! Our letter choices were C, D, I, M, E, and R. Ask me how I remember? When we entered the activity a second, third and fourth time it was the SAME JUMBLE EACH TIME. I can only assume that each level of the activity might have been different, but the idea that the game was so incredibly finite where the opportunity for learning could have been inexhaustible disgusted me thoroughly and I ended our experience right there. Why reveal the other three levels in ten minutes? Such a waste...

I also did not like the themes involved with this game. Stereotypes of people with accents got on my nerves. The days of Looney Tunes and the stereotype of "the lazy Mexican" are long over. While those cartoons still exist there are at least disclaimers on the DVDs that promote them to show that these racial and cultural depictions were reflections of attitudes openly prevalent the early forties and fifties. We're supposed to know better today. Worse yet, the activity that is run by the sleepy mouse with the accent confuses children (and adults alike) by rejecting sentences that are syntactically correct. Poor.

For these reasons I personally give the game a two. Many of Mia's antics made the children laugh. I must say that the activities are well constructed, yet fail miserably in variety of exploration. To save anyone else the disappointment of thinking they got an award-winning tool to help his/her child along with reading I must display a star of one. Skip this one and save your money so that manufacturers will know that we need better software to help our kids explore the amazing world of phonemes, spelling and sentence structure. Children certainly deserve better.

Mia is hard to move and it is difficult to know what you are suppose to do or where you are suppose to go. Many more times than not, my children get very frustrated and start screaming "stupid mouse!!" at the screen. The activites are set up so they don't teach anything but simply test the child as to what they already know.

The box said Mia's Big Adventure Collection has won over 90 awards. I went to the Mia website to see what awards it has won. Mia's big Adventure Collection has won a lot of parenting and toy awards! I didn't see any awards from educational organizations.

My opinion:
The software is not the easiest to use. I have a brand new Mac computer and the software sputtered, stopping when I tried to make Mia do something new. She had a hard time picking up objects. I thought the software was slow, too. It is as slow as the graphic software was from the early 1990s.

I would not call this reading software. I call this a game. The talking portion of the software is quite simple. The actual phonics part of the software is contrived. It is just inserted into the story without a natural flow.

I would never use this software at school. Home is a different story, especially since I bought it already. My son hasn't played with it yet.

I found this software very difficult to use. It does not have any "Stop" or "Go Back" button. The only way to exit an activity is to hit "Esc" button to exit the program and then start all over. When starting over, there is a very lengthy annimated introduction you have to go over each time and I could not find a way to skip it.

I did not think that introduction to the game was going to end. I thought that I may be able to skip it but no luck. Once into the game I believe that my child was enjoying the game and seem to be learning some great skills. Lastly, you have to hit the "F" keys and "Esc" to save and exit the game, not many program make you do that today.

Overall, I feel that this was a good purchase and I would have given 5 stars if functionally was better with program.

I bought this game for my two kids 5 and 7 and sat thought an interminable 2hrs while they played it.

The game doesn't come with instructions so you have to find them on the disk. Unfortunately even after reading them I did not find the game very intuitive.

One of the first things to occur is that the mouse gets violently mugged by a Rat. I wasn't expecting that when I bought the game.

It was a complete mystery to me how to save during the progress of the game until (yet again) I looked at the instructions. The progress of the gameplay is not instinctive and I had to look at the instructions (again) several times in order for the kids to progress further.

The complexities of the different mini games are too simple and repetitive, or too hard for the two of them to play without significant help and input from me. I was gritting my teeth much of the time due to the minigames.

On the positive side; the kids were able to handle the interface well, they liked the characters, music and graphics. You can change the complexity level of the game at any time during gameplay by going back to the main menu. It is fairly slick EXCEPT for the save feature which sucks (it should save automatically during the progress of the game).

This is NOT a learning game it is an adventure game with word puzzles, there is NO teaching involved. Since I bought this game expressly for my kids to LEARN I do not recommend it for anything but adventure/ entertainment play.

FYI: For all the "educated" parents out there READ THE INSTRUCTIONS. They tell you how to skip any animated sequence (including the intro movie) - hit the SPACEBAR. How to save - hit F3. How to skip a minigame and win while playing it - hit ESC. How to go to the main menu - hit F2. Oy!