Clifford Phonics (Windows, Mac)

Step right up! There's a carnival in town starring Clifford the Big Red Dog. In CLIFFORD PHONICS, early readers join Clifford and his friends as they attend the Birdwell Island Carnival, a special carnival full of booths and rides that teach reading. Youngsters play the activities to win "prizes" to use in decorating a float for the culminating Carnival Parade.

In one of the six major activities, the Ferris wheel isn't working because it has run out of power -- "word power" that is. Players motorize it by identifying words in specific word families. Other activities cover letter and sound recognition, rhyming, sentence completion, word-object association, and sight word matching. These activities level both up and down, depending on how the player is performing.

With Clifford Phonics, Scholastic has created a very engaging way for young kids to learn how to read. In addition to original and effective activities, the software pays attention to the small details that make learning to read easy, including providing hints and having the characters read aloud any word over which a youngster scrolls. Take your children to this carnival and they will come home reading.