JumpStart Toddler

Teaches simple concepts, easy to use for toddlers. It is very colorful and attractive and keeps them interested. I use it in a classroom for special needs children, some with behavioral difficulties and they stay focused and calm and even willing to take turns with a friend without a fuss. The music is beautiful at the "waterfall".

This product is too elementary for any toddler able to use a mouse. My toddler(boy) finds it boring. Go for the preschool stage. This will not only stimulate your toddler but make it more enjoyable.

Jump start products are the go-to items you NEED to get your toddlers reading and engaged! The format, coloring, visual quality of their stuff is awesome. We started all our nieces/nephews and children on their cd's. Kids love this stuff, so it makes your job as a parent easy! Highly recommend!

This is not bad software, but it is old and out of date which is reflected in the quality of the graphics, sound, and animation. It's still a viable set of activities for toddlers, but there are better ones. For example, the fisher-price.com website has a free "ABC Zoo" with better graphics and sound than the one on this CD. The same is true for the musical instrument activity. Besides that, it is short on activities overall compared to the latest Reader Rabbit Toddler. Adventure Workshop Toddler, which includes Reader Rabbit and 3 other CD's has several dozen more activities, all with superior sound and graphics. For the value offered, Jump Start would be a good deal at $3.

I only had a few minutes to evaluate this product before giving it as a gift, so take this with a grain of salt. Pros: cute characters, bright colors, cute songs, seemed to be a good variety of activities for learning numbers, letters, colors, etc., and basic dexterity skills. I was pleasantly surprised. Cons: the only thing I noticed was that there were no "menus" per se - it wasn't easy to figure out how to exit a section or skip to another one, or skip over the opening song and get right to the game. I did figure it out, eventually. This product is certainly worth the under-$10 price tag. Seems like quality went into it.

My daughter is 22 months old and already has Windows 7 figured out. She can log out of her mommy's user and log into her own limited account or put the computer to sleep when we tell her, "Let's take a break from the computer." She can switch between programs she likes effortlessly (e.g., Windows 7's Purble Place and Microsoft Word). She loves the PBS Kids web site and knows how to pause and full screen (and, unfortunately, un-full screen) Dora and Sesame Street on Netflix Watch-Instantly. But she cannot get a handle on this program and it both bores and frustrates her. The "loading" animations are long and the UI is terrible. What you can click on is completely unclear--even I had no idea what was actually interactive and what wasn't without some experimentation. (Think mid-'90s adventure games.) While it runs fine on Windows 7, it was a pain in the butt for me to make it full-screen (with its paltry 640x480 resolution)--I had to use my nVidia Control Panel to force it into full screen. Before that, it was a small window surrounded by blackness that took up only 15% of my screen (640x480 on a 1920x1080 monitor). Frustratingly, there's a coloring section that has an abominably stupid feature: a giant print button. Yeah, because I want my toddler to choose when to use printer ink and paper. What where they thinking?! There are some decent ideas here, but they were very poorly implemented. More than anything, the interactive parts of the program need discrete, well-defined buttons. As it is, the "play a song" button is the only thing that is (and, consequently, it's the only part my daughter knew for sure to click on). I had hoped to find something more toddler-friendly than Windows 7's Purble Place (which she likes but doesn't really "get"). Instead, I've got something which my daughter may grow into at some point (despite the ages for this being listed as 18-36 months) but which may turn out to be completely useless. The only thing this program taught my daughter was that the calculator button on my wife's keyboard would allow her to essentially ALT+TAB out of this program so she could go back to doing something more interesting. EDIT: I've uploaded a picture of the home screen to the images gallery so you can see what I'm referring to.

This is an old program. It doesn't work with latest Mac OS. I'm not sure what version of OS it will work on.

My daughter (2 yrs, 3 months old) LOVES this program. We have an old laptop we allow her to bang on. She has learned to use the mouse quite accurately in the month or so that we've had this program installed. She can't yet click the mouse button but most of this program only requires hovering over certain areas so that isn't an issue. We just need to buy her a (very small) laptop mouse instead of the big clunky one we have attached. She sings along with singing and has started counting, learning her ABC's, colors, all the things I should have been teaching her but never seem to have the patience or time for. It's the amount of progress she's made in the one month we've had it that just really amazes us. So far she's not gotten bored with the program even though she plays with it a LOT. I would have bought this much sooner if I'd known about it. My husband's coworker was raving about it and he told me so I thought I'd give it a try.