Child's play

Forget Teletubbies. Sesame Street? Yawn. The latest offering in children's programming is intended to bring out more of the Michael Jordan than the Albert Einstein in your kid. Babypro tapes and DVDs ($14.98; babyprosports.com) are 35-minute shows that promise to educate infants to preschoolers on three similar sports (the "ball" sports--basketball, baseball and soccer--are grouped on one DVD; swimming, diving and, yes, surfing are on another). The DVDs essentially are a collection of scenes set to classical music showing kids of various ages playing the sports. Basic rules, such as "Don't touch the soccer ball with your hands" and "Dribble the basketball," are repeated over and over.

I test-screened the DVDs for Mia, 3. She packs more energy than an entire Starbucks but settled down fairly quickly when I put in the first DVD. Lying on her back, she repeated parts of the narration and nodded or shook her head when the narrator asked basic questions. Still, some parts definitely missed their intended marks--during a scene of a baby splashing in a kiddie pool, I asked her what he was doing. "Washing his hands," she replied matter-of-factly.

One parent of an "almost 2-year-old" offers the following testimonial: "Hello college scholarship!" If that's your goal, you need more help than a DVD can give you. But if you want an athletic-oriented alternative to a singing purple dinosaur, Babypro DVDs are a nice choice.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning