Product Description

Help Clifford's owner handle all her chores before the Big Red Dog's birthday party! / Ages 4-8

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #296 in Software
• Brand: TOPICS Entertainment
• Model: 10748
• Released on: 2006-04-18
• Platforms: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS 9 and below
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .31 pounds

Features

• Dozens of new challenges are here for any child between the ages of 5-9 to explore
• With more than 1600 object-and-word searches in hundreds of clever pictures. Your kids will learn many new words and how to use them
• Play with riddles, puzzles, and games to develop your child's thinking skills
• As they play, children develop important learning skills such as reading, matching, and problem solving
• I Spy School Days challenges kids to use their heads

From Children's Software Revue® -- "Subscribe Now!"
Kids love pouring over the photo collages in search of each hidden object in this new I Spy CD, derived from Jean Marzallo's enjoyable book, I Spy School Days. Like the others in the series, the transition to CD-ROM is a nice one. There are still seven types of puzzles to solve, each one containing all-new object and word searches. Some games ask kids to find the objects in a riddle, for instance "I spy a pretzel, some beans in a hand, Red corn, eight candles, a BUS TRIP planned," with each riddle read aloud. The objects in question are colorful and interesting, and the search pages are plentiful, with fresh riddles each time kids play. The other puzzles are challenging and fun, keeping kids engaged. There's a Balloon Popper game in which children find the missing piece that sets a "Rube Goldberg" type contraption in motion. One puzzle has kids sorting objects into progressively harder Venn diagrams and another has them finding pictures to break secret codes. Testers favorite is still the "Make-Your-Own" I Spy activity where players create collages of objects and then write their own riddles for friends to solve, even recording their own voices if they wish. These can be saved, or printed for use away from the computer. While this may sound like just a lot of fun and games, there are many opportunities for learning. Vocabulary is reinforced and there are several chances for children to use listening and problem solving skills. This CD is even more responsive than previous versions, letting players interrupt the narration. Our testers thoroughly enjoyed the program, and their parents and teachers commented that it gets kids thinking and having fun at the same time.
Teaches: reading, logic, classification, visual memory, matching
Age Range: 5-8

From Parents' Choice®
Inspired by the "I Spy" series of books, this collection of nine activities combines the trademark I-Spy rhyming riddles with collections of small photographs of objects, animals and other things to create brain teasers that exercise problem solving skills, word play and creativity. Though a little like a one-punchline story, these visually rich games range from Oops Hoops, where kids sort different objects according to types, to Woodblock City, where kids search for items mentioned in riddles in a scrollable woodblock urban center. Graphics are intriguing, a real delight just to look at, especially in the Find Me activity which is wonderfully illustrated with a chalkboard cluttered with drawings, pictures, objects and words. The Nature game uses a magnifying glass to scour for hidden objects, and the challenging Make Your Own I Spy lets kids choose from more than 200 objects and mix them in with their own riddles. Scenes tend to be busy enough to make the search eventful, but redundancy here makes the law of diminishing return applicable-especially to the older end of the age range. A 2000 Parents' Choice® Silver Honor.

Reviewed by Don Oldenburg, Parents' Choice® 2000

Customer Reviews

i love i spy
this is a fun game to play. it keeps me on the computer for along time and my brothers get mad at me. It is sometimes hard to find the hidden pictures, but I love to try. My brother is 12 and he has a hard time finding things. I always find them first. I like the school I spy the best, but the spook house is fun too. I think it is fun to play because you see things that you see every day in school so they are easy to spot as long as you go to school. It also helps teach me to consentrate for long periods of time.

Elementary Kids Love It!
I am a computer lab teacher in an elementary school. Last year, I used this software for quite a few weeks when my Kindergarten through Grade 3 students came in for activity period. Students in grades 4-6 would beg to get a chance to use the software when their assignment for the day was completed.

It was a stretch for Kindergarten to find some of the items, because they did not recognize some of the items in the riddles, but I made sure to point these out in lessons and then circulated to help them more.

It was exciting to watch as students became absorbed in this activity, and most of them grew in their visual and verbal awareness. Children in grades 1-3 could either click to hear the descriptions or read for themselves.

Yes, it is on the shelf this year, but will taken out to be used in two years. This year I bought I Spy Spooky Mansion for use, and next year hope to get the Î Spy Treasure software if I can find the funding.

Deceptive, Not Really Compatible With Windows XP
Although this product claims to be XP-compatible, it doesn't really work unless you first change your system settings to run in Windows 98 compatibility mode, and set virtual memory settings back to 200MB. Even though the outer box says Windows XP, copyright dates inside the jewel case make it obvious this is really pre-XP software that has not been updated.

Since we use our computer for other things besides games, the only way my son can play is to wait for 5-10 minutes' worth of switching to an admin user account, changing memory settings, then restarting the computer. When he finishes, we have to put the memory settings back again so we can use the computer for other things.