This is called a "moving board book" because you are supposed to watch it with your baby and talk about it; like you would if you sat down together to read a book. I love the music. Because there are no words spoken, the music is very noticable (not just like background music).

Here's basically how it works: for the letter B, the B slowly, piece by piece, turns into a flying bee and the letter B then reads Bee. For C there are puffy clouds that move and then you see that they really are coming from the exhaust pipe of a car. C for Car. For E an elephant walks on screen and then falling rectangular shapes fall from the sky and the elephant bounces them up with his trunk. They bounce up and fall into the shape of an E. One of my favorite Mozart pieces, "Turkish March" is played for the letter R. The R has little legs and feet and runs all over the screen.

This is a very cute video. I like that it is slower pace which gives kids time to let each thing sink in. Too many baby videos are flashy and too fast. I have reviewed all the other So Smart videos so please read those reviews also.

Although my son seems interested in this DVD right now I find that the graphics are very simple and cheap looking. I don't have too much hope that his interest will hold. Some of the animation is so strange I find it a little frightening and am hesitant to play it for my son. Also compared to other DVDs geared to babies and toddlers it is very quiet and slow.

This DVD / video is amazing. I teach two year olds. I have 15 young minds to reach and this DVD is a wonderful resource. It is a piece of media that you have to interact between the children and the video in order to use it the way it was meant to be used. The adminstration at my school was amazed how my children could name every letter of the alphabet and comment about that letter. This is not a movie to just turn on and leave children to watch. Parents and teachers are given a pime opportunity to interact in an educational way with their children with this video. Simply, this video / DVD works!

I showed my daughter section(s) of this dvd every Saturday morning for about 2 months. She can reconize and tell me letters A-Z since she was 18 month old. The key to sucessfully using this dvd is "Parent Participation". Like when the video introducing letter "B", and a Bee is flying on the screen, we play pretend as a bee "flying" around. It works like magic.
You may want to play the video in sections, like watch the first section (A-F) the first time, see how it goes. If baby is ready to move forward, play the first and second sections the next time.

Our son was 22 months old when friends of ours gave him this DVD/CD set to offset all the gifts given to his baby brother recently born. We'd already been teaching him the ABC song, and thought this DVD would be an additional encouragement when we put it on. Little did we know.

Like an earlier reviewer, every time the baby giggles in the title, our son laughs "BABY!" We watch the talking letters version and repeat the narration together. On the first viewing our son got so excited he danced around the room as the letters and pictures moved on, off, and around the screen. He sings along to the classical music soundtrack. Wow.

The images are simplistic and crude, based on the research of Dr. Ludington-Hoe (see How to Have a Smarter Baby), so that they are striking and captivating for young minds. At just over two years of age our eldest can sing the ABC song, knows every letter in the alphabet, and has a vocabulary and communicative understanding that stuns most of the people we hang with.

The best part of this DVD is the required parent/caregiver-child interaction. Without asking my son questions about what he is watching, viewing this DVD is pointless. My only complaint is that the DVD games don't have background music. This shortcoming is easily remedied by an external CD player and the supplied "Playtime" CD.