Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat

Playable on the LeapPad, the LeapPad Plus, or the Quantum Pad, DR. SEUSS' CAT IN THE HAT creates a fun environment for strengthening second-grade reading skills. While reliving the story of the movie, kids play learning games that cover contractions, verb tenses, parts of speech, syllables, antonyms, synonyms, homophones and homographs, compound words, sentence structure, phonics, and logical thinking.

To learn verb tense, kids play with typical Seussian rhyme. They must select the correct verb in the rhyme: "They heard/hear a loud BUMP and they jump/jumped from their chairs. Yes, they jump/jumped from the BUMP that they heard/hear from upstairs." In an activity involving the "phunometer" (a wacky contraption that supposedly "reads" a child's personality), kids learn about adjectives and adverbs. For the phunometer to work, the Cat in the Hat asks the reader to respond to three questions by choosing from 20 adjectives and adverbs displayed on a grid.

While the movie received mixed reviews, the Leapfrog software/book based on it is worth exploring. The activities and games are extremely clever and great fun to play. Because the subject matter is so whimsical, the developers wisely incorporated a zany playfulness in the learning games. The games are engaging, regardless of whether your kids have seen the movie.