Dwizzle Dee: Colors, Sizes, Songs & Imagination is the first in a new educational DVD series that features muppet-like puppets to teach preschoolers basic skills.  Miss Ashley is a human-puppet who teaches her small class of three ‘monster-like’, hairy puppets about colors, comparative sizes, shapes, simple counting, and more in a simulated classroom setting.

The class also heads outside to explore the world of nature, and even delves into some very simple science lessons (learning about bees, and pretending to be bees for example.)  There is plenty of reinforcement throughout the disc, with a very strong emphasis on the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow.)

My four-year-old loves the prompts to respond and interact along with the DVD.  Miss Ashley asks simple questions and waits for your child to answer her before turning to her own ‘class’ for answers.  Rose always chimes in very excitedly, even to the mostly rhetorical questions like, “Does that sound like fun?”  She really gets into it!  cx DVD also uses real children to provide some of the prompted sounds to encourage your own children to join in.  This is definitely targeted strictly to the preschool crowd though; older children might feel like Miss Ashley is talking down to them a bit.

I do have a couple of points of concern with the DVD though.  When we get into the singing segments, the characters don’t sing well.  While this might seem familiar to children (how many of us naturally sing on-key?) it doesn’t provide a good model or standard for children to imitate.  It’s actually hard for my daughter to sing along even though the tunes chosen are very familiar, simply because the singing isn’t clear, high, harmonized, or necessarily in-tune.  Also, the character who pretends to be a Queen bee participates in visiting flowers (ostensibly to collect nectar), which is an activity Queen bees don’t engage in.

Still, Dwizzle Dee has been a hit for my little ones.  Rose compares it to “Treehouse” her favorite cable-based children’s programming station (it shows all the Nick Jr. shows up here.)  We only watch it in the city because we don’t have cable, but when she was talking about Dwizzle Dee she referred to it as “I’m watching Treehouse.” I take this as a high compliment from her.  Parents of the muppet-generation may also have a hard time resisting the shaggy, monster-muppets that are no determined kind of creature.

The DVD has a 30-minute running time, and also comes with an option that lets you watch the song segments along with sing-along subtitling.

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