Review: PandaParents

I want to take a few minutes to introduce you to PandaParents and their MESSYLEARNING FOR PRESCHOOLERS AND KINDERGARTNERS.

My Overview 
This is a product designed for 3-6 year olds which includes:

• Storybooks
• Read-to-me stories
• Workbooks
• Creative products

The idea behind this product is that the best learning occurs when your child is:

• Building Brain Connections: Different brain regions working together to learn various subjects.
• Building Self-Confidence: The child is creative and in charge. 
• Building Fine Motor Skills: Eyes and little hands work together in diverse activities.

To break it down, there are 3 Steps to the learning process as presented by PandaParents:

• Step 1: Story Time: Learn topics while reading with your child and allow them to watch story videos. 
• Step 2: Learning Time: Fun and engaging activities stretch learning beyond the story and videos.
• Step 3: Creating Time: Learn to tell a story, solve a problem, or express feelings and emotions in a creative way.

Let me let PandaParents break it down for you with this video: 

As it says in the video, in Short, PandaParents is trying to teach them to learn all these things listed below at one time:

• Reading
• Math
• Science
• Completes Activities
• Artwork

My Review
All right, so now that we discussed all the facets of this program, let me share the facts of how it worked for us.

Firstly, I only did this program with Hannah (age 3.5). Abigail (nearly 7) would have enjoyed this as well I believe but it was really beyond her and so I focused on just allowing Hannah to work the program.

Did she enjoy it? Absolutely. She really liked the videos and the worksheets and found them engaging. I do think she was learning and that it would be a good part of a curriculum for a pre-kindergarten or kindergarten aged child.

That said, I think the program is a bit "Messy." By that I mean, the website and the product weren't as "clean" as I am used to from a product. Different fonts and colors all over the place were a bit much more me.

However, my daughter loved it and was captivated. So maybe they are onto something!

I think this idea is fabulous and as it is refined, it could work really well for a family with a preschooler.  However, as I said, there were some things that would make the program not be fool-proof.

One of the issues for me is that the workbooks that were designed to be printed were full of color! Now this sounds great except that printing them would cost me a fortune in ink. I really think that this product would be best utilized in consumable workbooks that we could use at home. If I had the workbook in front of me and didn't have to print it myself, I think Hannah would devour it.

Let me illustrate this with a few screenshots that I took:

These pages are AWESOME. Hannah would love to do them. However, we just did them on the screen (missing out on a key fine-motor element) simply because printing things with this much color wouldn't work for us financially. (Probably the biggest part of my homeschooling budget is toner cartridges. I'm not kidding.)

I encourage you to try the program for free for one month and see if it would be a fit for your little one. You can do that by clicking this link. I really think this company is onto something and that children will really enjoy what they are putting out there. However, there are a few nuances that would need to observe and see if it could work for you and your little one.