by rafaulkn on September 3, 2007

According to my one year old son, the nightingale is the best. I’m talking about the free ABC’s Learning Zoo game at Fisher-Price.com, one of several enjoyable free activities on this site.

Fisher-Price Fun and Family Time zone offers a series of free online games and activities for infants and toddlers to preschoolers. Several of the games offer various skill levels for babies to advance in as they grow. The only advertising is in the titles of the games and on the main page itself.

My baby has been playing the peekaboo/surprise and alphabet zoo games since he was about 4 months old. He will tolerate the peekaboo games for quite awhile, but the alphabet game is clearly his favorite. In the surprise games, children hit random keys on a standard keyboard to make cartoon characters jump out of a colored box on the screen and make noises or say peekaboo. He usually figures out pretty quickly each play session that he can mash down a couple of buttons for continuous non-stop action with less effort on his part. The alphabet zoo game shows a letter of the alphabet then an animated animal that starts with the letter pops on-screen and makes its appropriate noise. Any keystroke will then advance to the next letter.

The games seem simple, but they are not foolproof. Playing each game does require almost constant adult participation. Certain keys will lock up the screen, and these keys invariably seem to be my son’s favorites. I have to keep the mouse within my reach so that I can quickly click on the page when he hits a function key in order to keep the play continuing and avoid an infant melt-down.

Most of the toddler games require use of the mouse. Little People and Snap ‘n Style characters star in small stories that require mouse clicks to move through the screens. They each have online coloring games using mouse clicks to shade in areas on a cartoon which can then be printed out. You can also print out a variety of coloring pages for offline crayon use, including Power Wheels pages. The toddler games ramp up in difficulty really quickly. The bubble mower and bubble tractor games are almost impossibly frustrating.

We haven’t tried out the preschool games yet, but I imagine there are some good offerings there as well. For my son’s part, he is content just playing the ABC’s Learning Zoo over and over. I have been very pleased with these free activities, particularly because they are available online and therefore we can access them at any relatives house or at my workplace without having to bring any discs along.

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