The challenge for all software publishers today is to find the balance between what is entertaining and motivating - and what is truly educational - without compromising good learning opportunities for pure entertainment. Tizzy’s Toybox has struck that balance perfectly, but then that’s not surprising with names like Sue Rankin, Mike Matson and Hans Rijnen in its credits.

Tizzy is a collection of educational activities for early years children, and is full of lively animations, speech and music. Tizzy is a clown who lives in a toybox surrounded by 10 other toys, each representing an activity. Once children have chosen a toy to play with, Tizzy does the rest by guiding them through the activities and games.

All the key skill areas are there: one-to-one correspondence, size recognition, sequencing, prepositional adjectives, matching, lettersound recognition, spatial matching, rhyming words, colourword matching and counting - all simmering in a pot of attractive, colourful graphics, soft-spoken instructions and stimulating sounds.

In addition, the CD-Rom version includes shapes of letters of the alphabet.

Extensive photocopiable worksheets accompany the software for those who wish to extend the activities or provide rein-forcement.

There are three levels of difficulty to choose from. The CD-Rom is worth getting as, in addition to the extra activity, there’s speech, music and en-hanced animations.

Tizzy is timeless. The range of activities is so fundamental to early learning and so well executed, that this software will become a resource to be used with generations of children.

Tizzy’s Toolbox takes fundamental concepts and moulds them into a delightful set of learning experiences for four to five-year-olds - an excellent resource.