Dora es muy bueno para los niños! (Dora the Explorer)

Member Name: Russ1973

Product:	Dora the Explorer
Date:	22/09/09 (6 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, Lively characters with lots of interaction

Disadvantages: Chance kids may confuse English and Spanish words

Dora the Explorer centres around Dora, a Spanish girl, her monkey, a talking backpack and a talking map with various other regular characters...such as Swiper the fox. It airs mostly on Nick Jr, though it can also be found on demand in the kids section of BT Vision.

My 2 year old loves this show...he's watched each of the 10 episodes on BT Vision (I don't have NickJr anymore) countless time and never tires of it. The show encourages interaction asking the viewer to shout out the answers to various questions and challenges.

My son loves it! Even as far as pretending to be Swiper the fox at home and taking stuff, hiding it, and then telling us 'You can't find it now!', just like Swiper.

My only concern with this program is that many of the answers that kids are encouraged to learn and say are in Spanish. Such as counting, colours, etc. Now in theory this is great, it gets kids learning a new language.
However, I have had problems with this with one of my other kids, when he was a toddler, he loved Tots TV, which featured a french speaking character. As he grew he had speech problems and ended up going to speech therapy, it turned out that the problem was that he was actually speaking fine, just he was using a lot of French words and phrases mixed in with his English and it took some time to correct this.

Learning a new language is all well and good. But perhaps it's best to wait until they have a good grasp of English, and know how to differentiate between English and another language.

Anyway, that said and done, it's a great show with lots of interaction and lively, colourful characters that kids love! Just make sure your young one knows the difference between Spanish and English words.

Summary: Great, colourful, lively fun...