LeapFrog Leapster Game: Scholastic Clifford The Big Red Dog Reading

Reading skills can grow by leaps and bounds when you join Clifford, Cleo and T-Bone on a giant-size learning adventure. Help the dog friends gather pages from Emily Elizabeth's joke book, which were blown all over Birdwell Island by one of Clifford’s huge sneezes.

As you look for the lost pages, you’ll play five different reading games—each set in a different part of the island. An automatic leveling system ensures that players progress at the right pace.

All Leapster games work with all Leapster Learning Game Systems (Leapster, Leapster L-Max and 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.

• Alphabetical order

While many children can sing the alphabet song, the ability to sequence letters in order signals the understanding of letters as individual units of language.

• Vocabulary

Infants and toddlers learn vocabulary by memory. Later, children use word structure and context to help understand the meaning of a word. They identify synonyms and antonyms. They use prefixes, suffixes and base words to build their own vocabulary.

• 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.

• Spelling

Children first learn to spell by breaking down words into sounds. But many sounds in our language have irregular spellings. Children must learn the fundamental spelling rules and recognize commonly misspelled words.

• Handwriting

Toddlers imitate writing by producing lines and scribbles. Next, preschoolers develop the ability to write the individual letters and numbers. As children begin to understand the relationship between letters and sounds, they produce words with invented spelling (mstr for monster).