Oobi

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.

I've been watching Oobi with my daughter since before it was a full-length series -- it used to be just little filler bits between the shows on Noggin. It has been wonderful to see the program grow as they are able to longer and more involved stories.

The puppetry on this show is just wonderful. I'm constantly amazed at how they manage to get so much expression out of a puppet that is nothing more than a hand with a pair of eyes on top. In one episode, when Uma has a cold, you hear her sniffling, and there's a subtle movement of the puppet that lets you SEE her sniffling as well. There's a subtlety to these characters that just is not possible with regular puppets, Muppets, or marionettes.

My only problem with the show is the voices of Oobi and Kako. According to Noggin's website, Oobi is 4 years old, and Kako is his best friend, so presumably he is also about 4. But the voices don't sound like 4-year-olds, especially Kako's.

But that is a small issue compared to the wonderful interaction of the characters. When Oobi teaches Uma to say "neighborhood", or visits Kako's house and learns to eat okra, or goes fishing with Grampu, you see a sweet, intelligent child. No wise-cracks, no disrespect, just honest relationships in a loving family.

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.

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!!

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!