In Mermaid Adventure, your child accompanies Barbie and Samika the seahorse as she tries to restore the light to the magic shell before the ocean city celebration. She can explore three undersea worlds and play seven games along the way, before she returns home and help Mermaid Barbie compose a song for the big party. She can even design a crown and necklace for the mermaid.

Enchanted Forest stars Barbie as the Swan Queen Odette, who must travel to six places and enliven them with color and sound, painting murals, making fields of musical flowers and more. Once your child creates five magic wands, she can enchant each area of the forest, ensuring that a surprise will await her at the picnic.

Imaginext Battle Castle. Defend the fortress against incoming attacks.

Vivendi also offers more action-packed, toy-based fare for boys and girls who enjoy rough-and-tumble games: Fisher-Price: Imaginext Battle Castle, Fisher-Price: Imaginext Pirate Raider and Rescue Heroes Mission Select. The first two feature over 25 missions each: Battle Castle challenges players to build huge castles and fight fierce monsters as they strive to imprison the dragon; Pirate Raider sets them sailing on the high seas as they build and customize a pirate ship and raid other vessels in their quest to become Pirate King. In Mission Select, gamers lead the Rescue Heroes team in land, sea and air missions that challenge them to put each character’s abilities to best use.

Rescue Heroes: Mission Select. The Rescue Hero with a water cannon sure comes in handy here.

Original Content

Perhaps you’d like to expose your youngsters to some never-before-seen characters. In that case, Viva Media offers you Learn to Play Chess with Fritz and Chesster 2 and The Number Devil, while Kutoka Interactive appeals with Didi & Ditto and Mia’s Language Adventure: The Kidnap Caper.

Learn to Play Chess with Fritz and Chesster 2. Our heroes get ready for another lesson.

Learn to Play Chess is the second installment in the adventures of Fritz, Bianca and Chesster, who are back with new training for players from beginning to more advanced skill levels. Over 20 mini games allow kids to experiment with what they’ve learned about basic opening moves that include King’s Gambit and Fool’s Mate, such middle game tactics as forks and skewers and endgame options, among which are key squares and the square rule.

The Number Devil. Robert appeals to his math mentor once more.

The Number Devil tells the story of Robert, who thinks math is a nightmare subject until the Number Devil appears in his dreams and shows him a new way to think about numbers. Over a ten-night period, Robert receives several engaging lessons each evening that put the fun into such concepts as prime numbers, roots and combinatorics. Robert’s adventures start easy and become more advanced, which enables your child to use them as after-school reinforcement as she progress through the school year.

Didi & Ditto. Uh oh, watch out for that wolf!

Didi & Ditto are a pair of beavers, one a boy and one a girl. During a stroll through the woods, one of them is kidnapped by Zolt, a vegetarian wolf (your child can play as either beaver). The player must guide the other beaver through a series of kindergarten-level math, reading, thinking and problem solving exercises, the rewards for which are the vegetables needed to exchange with Zolt for the trapped sibling. Three difficulty levels allow you to make the problems more challenging as your child gets older.

Mia’s Language Adventure. Mia confers with a friend during her adventure.

A missing family member also plays a role in Mia’s latest Big Adventure, which starts with the mysterious disappearance of the mouse’s grandmother, Mimi, just before she is about to win an art competition. Players get to practice their French or Spanish language skills as they help Mia find her. This one is aimed at slightly older kids ages 6 to 10, but it also includes three difficulty levels.

Getting a Head Start

Finally, no learning library would be complete without School Zone Publishing’s Flash Action Phonics and Flash Action Colors, Shapes & More, nor Knowledge Adventure’s Jump Start, a series of grade-specific titles that start with the toddler years and end with sixth grade. Each Jump Start volume features three CDs packed with over 35 math, reading, science and art activities, with more than 50 skills addressed. Seven learning styles allow you to find the one that’s best for your child, and Jump Start’s skill leveling feature sets the pace by figuring out where he’s having problems.

Jump Start. Having a blast with math.

The Jump Start series also features Study Helpers as well as titles aimed strictly at preparing students for phonics, Spanish and typing. Study Helpers, which covers grades one through five, comes in two versions, Spelling Bee and Math Booster, and allows your child to enter her homework problems and turn them into games. Pre-set problems are also included if you just want to run random drills. Like the grade-specific titles, the Jump Start supplements tailor the lessons to areas where your child is having difficulty.

Flash Action series. Two of the activities that help reinforce basic skills.

The Flash Action titles provide flash cards for your computer. The Phonics edition helps children age six and older learn and practice basic phonics skills, with progress tracking that rewards success by allowing them to enter one of four different play areas. The Colors, Shapes & More version is aimed at kids three and older and teaches them numbers, colors, shapes and rhyming words, with the same tracking and reward systems built in.