Children's BBC television has got really exciting over the last few years - and that excitement has now been transported onto your ST. Playdays, the education program, is based on the morning TV show and features the creatures, like the Why Bird, that your children are likely to be familiar with if they watch the television early in the day.

Playdays consists of ten traditional learning games as well as three other more relaxing games like Noughts And Crosses and Find The Treasure. There are four levels of difficulty and 25 letters to choose from, effectively, this means your child can work his or her way through 100 selections of games. You remain with the chosen letter - and, therefore, the chosen words - throughout all the games so you really do get very familiar with them.

Considering that there are usually only five or six words, this can get rather tedious, but at least the child eventually has a thorough comprehension of what each noun represents. Each of the games aims to encourage a different area, like co-ordination, word recognition, counting, reasoning, spelling and observation. In Matching, for example, you have to match the word to the picture.

Snap is pretty much like Snap, really, although at more difficult levels you have to match pictures with words. In Counting, you have to count the number of identical pictures that appear. In Moving Window there's a large picture which is covered apart from a small window that moves - and your child has to guess what the picture is and then attempt to spell the word.

There is quite a lot of variety in the types of games but they don't really vary enough between the difficulty levels. If you wanted to encourage your child to stick with this single program for five years (from four to nine), you are likely to find them losing interest very rapidly.

It can take some time to work your way through all the games related to one letter, but by the time you do get there, there's a performance table which shows the level achieved at the end of each game and a percentage score - handy for parents who want to keep an eye on how the children are doing, a necessity for this age range.

The graphics are bold and bright, you get a free Playdays magazine in the box and you're always encouraged along by the enthusiastic and friendly Why Bird. Fun and educational for a while.