The Princess and the Frog (Leapster) (Leapster)

In the Leapster version of THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, kids will see the story of Prince Naveen finding and falling in love with Tiana, a New Orleans girl who has a dream of owning a restaurant. Along with hearing the story, kids will play educational and creative games with the characters from the movie. From the main menu, the game offers five activities. In one, played with Tiana, kids help her to cook by identifying foods, counting specific numbers of ingredients into a pot, and chopping others into the correct number of pieces. In another activity, kids guide Prince Naveen (who has been turned into a frog by an evil spell) across numbered lily pads to rescue a trapped Princess Tiana. This lily pad game has three levels of difficulty to let kids practice identifying numbers from 1 to 10, as well as adding them.

This Leapster game has a nice combination of creative and learning games. Little girls will enjoy dressing up Princess Tiana for a ball and earning dream hearts to help her decorate for her wedding. However, the game also has learning games that drill counting, logic, letter recognition, spelling, and music skills. The game is very supportive and offers help when a child is having trouble; plus the learning games can be played on the level appropriate with your child's learning. The levels correspond to ages 4-5, 5-6, and 6-7.

The controls are a little sluggish, but it is something kids easily adjust to. The cooking game is quite good, but it may take a few tries for kids to figure out the cutting a vegetable is done not by sliding the stylus across the screen, but rather, by tapping on the item to be cut.

Online interaction: If played on Leapster 2, this game can offer more content online. If played on Leapster, kids will earn codes that can unlocked printables by going online. The game is careful to remind children not to go online without an adult.