JumpStart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals Review

DFG Exclusive Review Summary

Read Full JumpStart Preschool Review

Game Description

Editor's Update (10/22/14) - JumpStart no longer offers free downloads for the PC and is instead focusing on paid mobile games.  However, there is a free online JumpStart game for kids at JumpStart.com

Educational and Fun Early Learning Activities!

Through engaging and fun animated computer activities, your children develop their abilities in all the early learning skills with Jumpstart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals!

Phonics, vocabulary, music, and math are just a few of the areas where your children can get a head start and impress their preschool teachers.

The content of Jumpstart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals is based on strict state educational standards, so you know your kids are getting the best instruction possible!

Engaging Gameplay Keeps Children Interested

Do you have trouble getting your kids excited about learning? If so, you're not alone, but Jumpstart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals was conceived and designed with that exact problem in mind. The game was made just for you!

Tailored to each child's individual learning style, Jumpstart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals includes a unique motivational system of rewards. Each time your child completes a task, his or her adorable on-screen animal character is rewarded with a snack or a toy. Kids love it, and it always keeps them coming back for more great learning!

Easy-to-use Ways for Parents to Follow Growth and Progress

Being involved with your child's development won't be a problem since you'll enjoy seeing the enjoyment and satisfaction they get out of playing. Still, Jumpstart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals also provides you with ways to keep close tabs on, and thus help aid, their learning.

A number of skill levels for each activity provides paths to advance as well as variety in choosing where to start. The game also includes an in-game assessment test and regular progress reports which can be printed out and looked over by the whole family!

Give your kids the confidence, experience, and knowledge base to start a successful school career, only with Jumpstart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals.

JumpStart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals Review

Learning Can Definitely Be Fun

JumpStart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals is an educational game that aims to turn learning into a fun playtime experience for preschoolers. Does this game deliver both enjoyment and education? Read on to find out!

Kid Friendly Art Design

The art style of JumpStart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals is cartoony and approachable for boys and girls alike. The characters and backgrounds are colorful, bright and engaging. Overall, the quality is close to that of a children's TV show.

Pleasant Music and Excellent Voice Acting

The music in this game is peppy, upbeat and energetic without being overly loud or repetitive, which is a problem for most children's games. In addition, the voices are top notch. Parents won't mind hearing this game in the background.

Age Appropriate Gameplay

When this game is launched, a group of animal characters introduce themselves to the child, offering a small description of their likes and abilities. Ideally, the child will select the animal guide that matches their learning style the best, but realistically kids will probably ignore the introduction and simply pick the animal they like the most. The selected animal character will serve as the child's guide as they make their way through the game, but advice from all characters is available by pressing the star button during learning activities.

Children are invited to work with baby animals to prepare them for a new home. A variety of baby animals are available for children to choose from, including bunnies, lizards, guinea pigs and turtles. When a baby animal is chosen, it will appear in the classroom of the schoolhouse in a special pet safe pen.

The schoolhouse serves as a menu for all the fun activities kids have to choose from. Successfully completing these activities unlocks special pet items that can be used on the baby animal in order to prepare it for a new life with a new family. Collecting necessary items for the pet serves as the motivation for getting children to play, and it's very effective.

When the baby animal has been played with enough, a special hot air balloon picture appears in the play area. When clicked, the player is put in control of a hot air balloon that flies high over many different international destinations. From here, the child can pick the family they want their baby animal to live with. This family will then send the child a thank you letter, and this letter will go into the scrapbook in the bookshelf of the schoolroom.

Giving children full control over when and where they send their baby animal eliminates any sadness over seeing the critter go, and collecting letters is a fun activity that adds to this game's replay value.

Wonderful Educational Activities

This game has many activities for children to choose from, including:

• Bubble Pop - This game teaches letter recognition by having kids pop bubbles that match the letter on their bubble wand. The pace is laid back and relaxed, and the game never pressures children into making a snap decision.
• Music Maker - In this activity, children are given a taste of music appreciation. Kids get to make their own musical tracks by selecting the instruments they want and putting them on the music sheet. There are three styles of music to choose from: Jazz, rock and roll and classical.
• Animal Mask - This is a fun art activity that lets kids unleash their creative side. There are 8 unique styles of ears, eyes, noses, heads and hats to choose from, in addition to 8 colors and 5 patterns. Coloring things in is as simple as selecting a color and then clicking the desired area, but it feels more engaging due to the squishy paint sound effects. This activity alone will keep kids busy for hours.
• Shape Tag - This activity features little shape people with big, watermelon seed eyes. Kids must click the correct shape when it's called out in order to win.
• Picture Perfect - Help wild animals strike the perfect pose in this photo activity. Putting animals in order from largest to smallest or completing patterns of animals will lead to photos that are truly picture perfect.
• Rhyme Time - In this game, children are taught the basics of poetry and rhyming. Children are shown a word and then given a set of possible rhymes for it. Learning how rhyming works couldn't be made any simpler or more intuitive than this.
• Magic Chalk - The enchanted chalk will draw an object, and the game will say the name of it. Then kids are tasked with finding a particular letter in the word that makes a certain sound, which the game will say. This is a most excellent phonics drill for children because it goes from sound to letter rather than letter to sound, like most phonics activities and games do. Children will gain much greater phonetic proficiency from this activity alone.
• Balloon Animals - Someone is ready to make balloon animals, and it's up to the player to click on the right number, size and color of balloons for the job.

All of these activities are simple and effective. They are both fun and educational at the same time, and kids will want to play all of them again and again.

Impressive Replay Value

There is an endless supply of homeless baby animals for kids to help raise and rehome. That paired with the fact that this game has three dramatically different difficulty levels means that this game has almost infinite replay value. Children will eventually outgrow it rather than becoming bored with it.

Many Different Learning Styles

Each animal tutor is associated with a different learning style:

• Eleanor -- Linguistic
• Casey -- Kinesthetic
• Pierre -- Musical/Rhythmic
• Frankie -- Interpersonal
• Keisha -- Visual/Artistic
• CJ -- Naturalistic
• Hopsalot -- Logical/Mathematical

These animals are based loosely on Dr. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which simply states that everyone has their own preferred way of taking in and processing information, especially during the learning process.

The thing that makes this game a powerful tool for learning is the fact that each of the 7 animal tutors is available during any activity. That means that no matter what kind of learner a child is, there will be a detailed, thorough explanation that makes sense to them, and they will learn. This level of customization makes this game superior to many others in the educational genre.

Subpar Submenus

The submenus aren't something that a preschooler will easily understand on their own, despite the tutorial that briefly goes over them. The rest of the game is so excellent and beyond expectation that it's surprising that something so basic was overlooked. Parents will need to help their kids navigate through the menus controlling difficulty levels and settings, but fortunately this won't be necessary on a daily basis.

Conclusion - An Outstanding Preschool Game

Overall, JumpStart Advanced Preschool Fundamentals sets the bar for what a preschool educational game can offer. One of the best games for preschoolers, period.

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