LeapFrog ClickStart Learning Carnival

Step right up to learn about letters, numbers, shapes and other essentials.  Exciting and challenging carnival games introduce a range of valuable school skills.

Learning skills:

• Colors

By grasping the concepts of color, shape and pattern, infants and young children begin to recognize and organize visual information.

• Rhyming

The act of rhyming directs a child's attention to the similarities in words (hat sounds like cat). Because sensitivity to rhyme comes quite naturally, it is an excellent entry into phonological awareness, or the ability to distinguish individual sounds in words.

• Letter names

Young children typically recite or sing the alphabet before they recognize individual letters. By preschool they begin to identify letters by name and shape.

• Letter sounds

Before they can learn to read, children must learn letters and their sounds. Once children associate printed letters to sounds, they can begin to sound out words for reading and spelling.

• Uppercase and lowercase letters

While children typically recognize uppercase letters first. lowercase letters are essential for learning to read because they make up 95% of text.

• Phonics skills

To learn to read, a child must understand the letter-sound relationship and distinguish individual sounds, or phonemes, within words. Crucial to reading, phonics skills help children sound out new words (If I can read "pot," then I can read "hot" and "spot").

• Word building

To read and write, children must understand how individual letter sounds blend together to make words.

• Shapes

Identifying and manipulating shapes lays the groundwork for geometry by giving children concrete experience with angles, symmetry and relative sizes.

• Numbers

To begin their study of math, children must distinguish numerals from letters and shapes and to understand that numbers are symbols for amounts.

• Sorting

From blocks to cars to dolls, infants and toddlers actively arrange the objects around them, using visual discrimination to group objects by attributes such as shape, size and color. By kindergarten, sorting develops into the school skill of classification.

• Reasoning and problem solving

Toddlers use their curiosity and logical reasoning skills to solve everyday problems. By investigating all sorts of possibilities, they develop unexpected solutions and creative problem-solving strategies.