zorealis

As a kid I never played any of The Learning Company's dozens of Reader Rabbit games, so today we'll be correcting this surprising gap in my edutainment knowledge. zorealis suggested the first game in the series, 1984's Reader Rabbit, aka Reader Rabbit and the Fabulous Word Factory. The alternate title sounds suspiciously Oompa-Loompaish to me, so fingers crossed that we will not meet with any gruesome poetic justice.

The game's menu offers nine options: Sorter, Labeler, Word Train, and six different Matchup Games. In Sorter you get a series of words, and you have to decide whether each one matches a given letter in either the first, second, or third position. If it matches, you move it over to the side, but if it doesn't you throw it in the garbage. (This obviously predates the 1990s eco-tainment craze, or else we'd be recycling.)



( More on Reader Rabbit )

Reader Rabbit was wildly popular and led to a slew of sequels and spinoffs. I had never heard of 1986's Writer Rabbit until delphi brought it to my attention. Now, I'm not saying that playing this game will make you as good of a writer as delphi is... but I'm not not saying that.

While Reader Rabbit offers a solid but fairly staid selection of spelling exercises, Writer Rabbit is far more wacky. After punching out from a week of back-breaking labor at the Word Factory, it's time to attend Writer Rabbit's Sentence Party and cut loose with a mix of games mashing up sentence diagramming and Mad Libs. In the Ice Cream Game, you are given a phrase and have to identify it as either WHO, WHAT, DID WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, or HOW.



( More on Writer Rabbit )

You can play Reader Rabbit and Writer Rabbit on the Internet Archive, for the finest in lapine-themed edutainment. Did anyone else play a game from this series? There are a million of them!

Early spring in Vermont is a lot like winter, but with less snow. We can see the ground, but the trees are still completely bare, grass hasn't grown, and the only flowers yet are the occasional bloodroot and optimistic crocuses. On one hike I got excited to see some green on a hill, but it turned out to be last year's ferns, all squashed flat. There are still many days that hover around freezing, alternating between rain and snow. Earlier this week I had to drive in a sudden aggressive windy snowstorm that didn't stick but made visibility near zero.

But the important question: How are the birds doing? Migratory species keep showing up one by one. We saw our first Double-crested Cormorant of the year flying over Lake Champlain while we were visiting the waterfront. Eastern Phoebes are also back, including the one who makes its summer home in our yard. Several mornings I've seen it in the tree out my bedroom window, doing its characteristic tail-bob. And I heard my year's first Wood Duck before I saw it on the river—they don't quack, but let out a distinctive squeal.

We're on the edge of the year-round range for White-throated Sparrow and I have seen them here in winter before, but they're much more common in the spring and I've been hearing their ohhh sweeet caaaaanada song. Red Crossbill can supposedly be here in the winter too, but I saw my first of the year this week.

It's also getting easier to see waterfowl now that some of the smaller lakes and ponds aren't completely frozen over. Hooded Mergansers can be seen on the non-frozen parts of Lake Champlain in the winter, but now they're back on our local pond too.

We also get species briefly passing through while headed elsewhere on their migration routes. I was excited to spot a pair of Northern Shovelers on the pond in late March, which was a little early for them to show up here—the eBird app prompted for evidence when I reported them, so I attached this very non-aesthetic but at least diagnostic photo. They're both in this picture, but the brown female is much harder to see!



I think I was the first to see them, or at least my eBird report was first. I felt kinda special scrolling through all the subsequent reports as birders flocked to take a look. I also saw a pair in the same spot last year in the first week of April; I wonder if they're the same birds.

And the year-rounders who have been here all winter are shifting into breeding mode. Every day the American Goldfinches at our feeder are a little yellower, their breeding plumage showing up in scruffy patches. Black-capped Chickadees are a constant as always, but I'm hearing more territorial yooo-hooo calls as well as the eponymous chick-a-dee-dee-dee. The little Brown Creepers are singing instead of just buzzing, and I spotted one darting in and out from behind the peeling park of a tree, immediately after I saw a video explaining that that's where they nest!

So that's 53 species for me in 2026 so far. Countdown to warbler season in a couple of weeks!

Every year in April, LGR used to do a themed month of edutainment game reviews. Since he called it quits I have held my own Edutainment Month here on DW, because it's important to be the change you want to see in the world.

First up is Word Rescue, a platformer designed to drill kids on reading basic words. The deep lore of the game is that the Gruzzles, these evil little monster guys, can't read, and they don't want anyone else to read either, so they have stolen all the words from our books and you have to, you might say, rescue them. You do this by jumping into question mark blocks which turn into words, and then finding the picture that matches that word elsewhere in the level. When you've matched them all, you get the key to the next level.

I'm gonna be honest with you guys: ( This game is actually kind of hard. [cut for length] )

You can buy the full version of Word Rescue on Steam for $4.99 USD. You can also still download the free shareware episode from the website of the developer Redwood Games, which delivers a dose of nostalgia in itself as it appears not to have been updated since 2006. (I enjoyed the indignant rant about Windows Vista breaking backwards DOS compatibility.)

But note that Redwood's site claims Word Rescue was "the first game ever made in which you got to pick whether to play as a girl or a boy," which is a bald-faced lie. Just off the top of my head, I can think of Moraff's World (1991), Ultima VI (1990), and who could forget Fred/Fiona Fixit of the great Night Shift (1990)? So it's up to you whether you want to do business with such a mendacious organization.