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08/08/2004 |
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Clifford Reading The bright red dog learns to read
Clifford Reading is aimed at ages 4 to 6. It starts with a really colourful and musical intro that grabbed our testers attention. The game remembers your child’s name and also saves previous sessions allowing you to review a progress report on how well your child is getting on. You can also select which of 3 difficulty settings you want. The first lesson is an introduction to some letters and their sounds and shows a few words that use those letters. The letters introduced on this screen come up in other activities to reinforce the lessons. This is all done in a fun way. Even our youngest tester was saying the letters and sounds the first time they tried this. Completing a task rewards the child with a golden ticket. Once you have six tickets you can trade them in for a gift. This helps inspire perseverance and a desire to keep trying.
One small complaint we have is on the balloon sellers game where you have to burst the balloon containing the word the balloon seller calls out. The balloons move very fast and it would take a lot of practise to be able to hit them, let alone hit the correct word. Also, there seems to be a bug on one of the activities at Clifford’s neighbours house where you are given the task of cleaning up their garden. You have to put items in the correct lettered box. Two boxes featured the letters B & H but when a picture of a dog appeared it was accepted in the B box! We particularly liked the painting and word association activity. You write a word using the musical paint pallet and one of Clifford’s friends paints a picture to reflect the word. We thought this was a clever idea and very entertaining. We really liked this package. We could see our testers were already learning things in a short space of time and it had lasting appeal. The pace was good and the lessons well structured as well as fun to play. A big thumbs up.
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