Age Down Adaptation (ADA): Pandemic

I'm going to begin by stating we have the original version of Pandemic not the shiny new one.
This is a game o really enjoy.  I've heard a number of comments about this and other co-operative games that are certainly valid but i don't feel that these things in any way diminish my enjoyment of them.
The biggest two concerns I've heard are,
1. they're multi player solitaire games. - It's true they can be played alone, that's part of the beauty of them i think.
2. When there is one player who is stronger in knowledge, and personality they can just direct others around and end up essentially playing the game on their own anyways.  fact is this comes down to the players and epople involved, it's not a fault with the game, that is an issue with the players.  I've never experienced this when I've played ANY co-op game.

But all of that aside there are plenty of blogs and podcasts on this topic  I'm actually writing today about adapting Pandemic for playing with younger children than its recommended 10 up.

I have a four year old
and a three year old.
They are in no way capable of playing this game to it's full potential but they want to play the games we play so we need to turn our mind to how we can do that with them.
In this case it is simply a luck of the draw game.
Each player gets a colour cube
Using only the infection cards each player flips over a card and the 'owner' of the colour card that gets flipped over puts a token on a city of their colour.
This version works on taking turns colour recognition, hand eye co-ordination and acceptable sportsmanship behavior (no gloating when winning no pouting when losing, fun being the aim of the game)

Another level of this, that both my little ones can still do is an added rule that wen you place your cube you must place it on a connecting city (even if it's not of your colour)
Here we have the same lessons as above with the addition of a little strategy (starting in the best place to make sure you're filling your cities not your opponents .  I have also considered this might be a wonderful example of showing how disease can spread in our world.  A lovely demonstration of why people shouldn't go to school/work when sick.  For the younger players this is a chance to speak about the concept of 'to and from' in terms of following paths, origins and destinations.

Next would be to add the pawns, move your pawn 2 times around the board (according to the lines) collecting tokens (just entering the city to collect all tokens, then infect the colour of the card you draw, When the last card is drawn the person with the most tokens wins.
At reading stage it could be that the tokens are placed on the city the name instead of just the colour, this of course adds a geography component to the game.

As they get older the epidemic cards could be added to the game, pawn actions can be increased to 4 but it now takes an action to remove 1 cube back into the dish.  If any one colour dish is empty players lose.  and epidemic cards put the cards from the discard pile back into the draw pile.  This is an idea, and untested as my wee ones are still at the earlier stages of this adaptation, it may be needed in order to make it a little tougher to assign more than one cue per revealed card.

I think from here the full blown game is the next step.

So there are our ideas, both tried and tested and as yet theoretical.
if anyone wants to try any of them and let me know how it played, or any other suggestions i'm open to them and would love to hear them.