Little Pim Review

Ever since the cellist was a little kid, Mr. Houseful and I have always wanted him to learn another language. We weren’t sure which one we wanted since he took Spanish in high school and I took French. Either way, we really dropped the ball with him (we’re still trying to weave it in there somewhere though) and now we’ll be trying again with the trifecta that is the ladybug, and the Twizzlers. We were offered a chance to review Little Pim and I couldn’t wait!

I was contacted by Little Pim (no, not the panda) to test out one of their language CDs on the little ones. I received the fifth DVD in the Spanish series – Happy, Sad, and Silly, which was probably a perfect one for us since the kids really love pretending they are experiencing every emotion under the sun – ESPECIALLY crying. Days are super fun in our house. SUPER. FUN.

Little Pim is a language program started in 2008 by Julia Pimsleur Levine when she wanted to teach her son French, and after researching, realized that the programs offered weren’t up to par. She then went on to create her own language program – and thus Little Pim was born! Pimsleur Levine grew up in a bilingual household and understood the benefit. Little Pim was created and went on to earn 24 consumer and educational awards!

The CD cover says that it’s best for children ages 0-6 years. With the Twizzlers being 2 and the ladybug being 5, I figured that they would really be able to test the product as well as any adult could. I figure in order to give you a pretty accurate review, I would have to list the pros and cons in order.

Here we go:

Little Pim Review

Pros

• The characters are colorful and lively – a Panda (Pim) an Elephant (Lola) and a Bobcat(Bob) who I thought was a leopard the entire DVD. I’m failing with my imagination
• In addition to the animated characters, there are plenty of children to help show their emotions and actions in a realistic manner.
• The episodes are short (five minutes long,) to help keep the sometimes short attention spans of kids
• The repetition is there. After a while, I was able to remember key phrases.
• It’s now available on Leap Frog and iTunes
• There are 12 different languages available

Cons

• There aren’t really any. The DVD does exactly what it promises. There are subtitles so that adults can give translations, but that kind of defeats the purpose. 
• For the first couple of viewings, the trifecta would attempt to repeat the words in Spanish and then collapse into a fit of giggles or pretend sobs mimicking the children on the screen. My non-teaching personality is still trying to grasp how to effectively help in this arena, but I may just give up, and reinforce with the DVD’s while enrolling them in an immersion program.