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the Traveling Homeschooler
by Kristina Brooke
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July 25th, 2009

JumpStart Your Child’s Interest in Learning

gview As a homeschooling mom, I am often looking for educational aids that my daughter will find interesting and will give her me the opportunity to track her progress. I was recently given the opportunity to review JumpStart Virtual World, an online and CD-based 3-D gaming world children ages 3-10, created by Knowledge Adventurewho is known for the award winning JumpStart and Master Blaster series of educational games.

There are currently two worlds which provide different games and activities in reading, writing, critical skills, math, and art. StoryLand, for preschoolers offers children the opportunity to designs their own homes, read-along with stories and play games like Concentration (which encourages memory), sorting items based on letters, shapes, and colors, arranging items based on size, and completing various puzzles.

While JumpStart has been in beta since December 2008, there are many additions to it’s world. Adventure Land, for children ages 5-8, includes a number of new games in which “kids are invited to explore a mysterious lost island off the coast of JumpStart.” On the island, children will have to survives missions and explore a number of mysterious discoveries using a combinations of speed, logic, and problem-solving to outsmart the villains determined to thwart their attempts at success. And there is so much more to the world. There are arcade games, music and videos, fun slides, space games and more.

So what do I think of the game? It’s amazing. The online worlds and the the cd-based games offer numerous opportunities for parents to engage their children in learning. It is proof the learning does not have to be tedious and stressful. My only complaint is that my daughter, 3, has a difficult time using the mouse to play the games on her own and gets frustrated. However, because their on-screen characters can wander around the land, I try to use this “rest time” to allow her to learn the use the mouse and the arrow keys.

My daughter absolutely loves this game. We limit her use of TV and video games to about 30-40 minutes a week and while I know that not every game and TV show can be educational, I love that she enjoys this educational game more than any other that we have tried. She loves sliding down the huge water slide and into the water and we spend a lot of time doing this repeatedly. She also enjoys the memory and letter-recognition games.

Take a look at the videos below to see my daughter playing at JumpStart.com.

Creating character

Exploring JumpStart.com

Exploring Storyland