Oobi

We first stumbled onto Oobi right after the season started. Little did we know that our then 1 1/2 year old would fall in love with it. Needless to say the show is very cute and even holds the attention of my husband and I. We find ourselves laughing at the characters with the little things they do that are just hysterical. Who would have known that a "hand" could make someone laugh as hard as Oobi does. My son absolutely loves it. But not only does it serve as just a cute show, it also teaches kids basic principals of life. Overall I would definitely recommend this show to anyone with kids. (Or without for that matter) This show is definitely for keeps!!

My two year old daughter does not have a speech delay and she loves Oobi. She has been speaking in complete sentences since she was 12 months old. She would watch Oobi several times a week and my daughter did not develop any speech problems as a result of watching Oobi. In fact, she has better vocabulary and diction than the rest of the children in her daycare class. It is a shame that a parent would blame a TV show for their child's speech impairment. Television should not be teaching our children to speak properly, we should be charge of that. This show is mainly for the entertainment of small children. This show is cute and has a good moral message for children.

When I first saw this show it was a interstitial on Noggin. I thought it was kind of stupid, But our son, who is handicapped and has very limited speech because of a brain injury at birth, was taken by it at once. Then it got it's own half-hour, and I watched it with him. The entire show breaks down story telling to the basics without talking down to kids. The characters are as described: just a hand with eyes attached. But they also wear costumes at times. The amount of emotion and "acting" that is presented is simply amazing. The puppeteers are extremely talented to be able to bring these characters to life in a way that you accept after a very short time. Unlike a lot of kids TV this show is very watchable and includes some inside jokes for parents at times (things like all the "parents" at a play having to turn off their cell phones before the performance). The writers of the show made a conscious decision to make the language simple too. No adverbs or conjunctions. My son can follow the story and understand the concepts being presented and when I have used the same basic language with him apart from the show and relating to our everyday life, he responds. Being able to communicate with him in such an unfettered way for the first time in his life means everything to me. It is not a typical puppet show, but it has won the heart of our atypical son...and his parents too.

I am a mother of two-year-old and a secondary English teacher and watching this show makes me flinch at all the incomplete sentences in which the characters speak. In one episode Oobi and his supposedly ethnic friend Kako take singing lessons and attempt to sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" in a round except the creators think it's fine to omit words from their (the characters) vocab so the song they sing goes more like "row row row boat gently down stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, life but dream." My child loves show but I have to leave the room when it's on or I go insane verbally filling in their pronouns and conjunctions or whatever other fragmented sentences dribble from their mouthes (or fingers). The message they try to get across is always a good one and sometimes they throw in subtle humor only adults will get, but the writers definitely need to stop worrying about saving trees and start teaching kids that grammar is not all that bad.

When our family got the Noggin network, we discovered a show with talking hands, complete with eyes, that were as heartwarming as anything we had ever seen. Basically, this show is like crack for little kids it is so addictive. Oobi learns about the world around him with his grandfather, Grandpu, his little sister Uma, and his best friend Kako. They do much of everything regular families do, and they learn about different things in the process. My kids love this show so much. We constantly watch Oobi, which I don't really mind, because the characters aren't loud or obnoxious, and my kids learn a lot from them. Oobi is definitely a show worth letting your kids watch!