Cheap Arthur's Reading Games (Software) (Windows 95, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows 98) Price

Arthur's Reading Games contains five reading activities that deal with spelling, word construction using parts of words and individual letters, whole-word recognition, and story building. Kids can also take a break from the world of words by visiting the Dance Theater, where they can program Arthur to boogie along to his theme song, and paint different backdrops for the stage he dances on. The same activity can be found on Arthur's Learning Games.

Francine's "Word-O-Matic" is one of the better games. Francine has built a machine that turns a vat of green goo into parts of words. The invention intones the word to be spelled, and hands over the first letter, and players must decide which blob of goo will complete the word. A writing activity gets laughs with the nonsensical options it offers kids, who must fill in the blanks to complete a one-page story in a big book Buster has discovered. At level one, the options are pictures (toilet, tiger, liver) that get plugged into the story. At level five, kids get written lists of adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech to choose from. The goofiness of the choices occasionally gets in the way of good grammar. We managed to create many wacky, yet incorrect, sentences such as: "It takes special tiger to shop for a nice outfit."

Favorite Arthur characters lead each of the five activities, yet they do not remedy the plainness of some of these offerings. A "guess the word" game that left us wanting more featured Arthur's little sis, DW, standing on a ladder in the stacks and demanding kids spell a word she's thinking of by clicking on letters on the spines of books. If the correct letter is clicked, the book gets moved onto the library shelf, and when the word is eventually built (the only clue DW gives players is the number of letters) DW repeats the word, and all of the books go back to the cart for another round. When we spelled "COB" the word wasn't used in a sentence, no book about corn flew out of the stacks, and the library remained indifferently silent. Arthur's Reading Games doesn't exploit the creative possibilities of its setting, nor does it effectively explore the wonders that reading can unlock, which is a shameful waste of any library. (Ages 5 to 7) --Anne Erickson