LeapFrog Leapster Game: Ratatouille

Savor words as well as food facts on this culinary adventure. Things get cookin’ when Remy the Rat lands in Paris to pursue his dreams of becoming a great French chef, just like his hero Gusteau.

Help Remy take a bite out of Paris and prove anyone can cook by digesting (and enjoying!) essential reading skills and fun food facts.

All Leapster games work with all Leapster Learning Game Systems (Leapster, Leapster L-Maxand Leapster TV).

Learning skills:

• 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").

• Relative Sizes

Which is bigger? Which is longer? The ability to compare sizes lays the groundwork for geometry, measurement and estimation.

• Classification

Essential for math and science, classification is the ability to identify and group objects by attributes such as color, size, number, function, length, volume, weight, area, time and other familiar characteristics.

• 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.

• Matching

Matching develops early logic and reasoning skills and is a component of early math and literacy. Children match like objects, shapes, patterns, pictures and stories, letters to sounds and pictures to words.

• Recognizing and extending patterns

The ability to extend, complete and duplicate patterns by determining the specific attributes of those patterns is a logical reasoning skill that forms that basis for future work in math.