This game is designed from the same people who bring reading books to your child’s home and school, and feature one of the largest story characters to life. Our friend Clifford is up to a new adventure and needs you to help him at the carnival. This game is designed to focus on building phonics skills that help a child combine a series of phoneme sounds to make words. Being an elementary teacher I can attest to the need for students to develop both sound and word recognition and the people at Scholastic have done a great job.

The first thing that caught my eye in this Big Red Dog adventure is the nice and smooth introduction. The game objective is clear and quick to the point. The object is to visit all of the games at the carnival while trying to earn decorations (rewards) for your child to decorate his/her parade float.

What kind of games do I play?

If you consult the box you will find that the game includes 12 entertaining activities and carnival games. In my investigation of this title I found the following activities:

1. The first game is skee-ball where the child can roll the balls to make a word. Upon completing the word the game does an excellent job of modeling how to stretch the word for the child to practice.
   
2. The second game I discovered is where the child has to reconnect to the broken balloon machine to make parade balloons.
   
3. In this game the Ferris wheel breaks and the child has to use word power to complete the word families. The child can click on the letter and the computer does an excellent job of repeating the sound.
4. The child gets to hammer the red button to change the silent letter. Example: After hitting the button (cap) changes to (cape).
   
5. I particularly liked the silly stories booth. In this booth the child gets to fill in the blank words with words from a list. It so happens that all of these words start with the same letter. This game has an excellent feature where the game will READ-ALOUD to your child so they can follow along the highlighted word. When their story is complete your child can print the story and read it another time.
   
6. The Wheel of Words- around it goes, what word is makes, no one knows. This wheel spins to make words. I noticed that at the early stages all of these words have the same rime, but different onsets. Example: bat --> cat --> mat. Notice all of these words have the same (at) sound.
   
7. This booth has Clifford’s friend T-Bone trying to cross a tightrope. If the child can pick the picture that rhymes with the word displayed then T-Bone is given added tools to help him balance across the rope.
   
8. Whack-A-Letter: Fans of Whack-A-Mole will get a big kick out of this game. The letter pops up and you whack it!
   
9. Cow-Den- Roundup: The child has to round up all the cows that begin with a single letter such as all the (D) cows. As the game advances the child has to find cows that have capital and small letters such as all of them that have either a (G) or (g).
   
10. This last game has Jetta diving off of Clifford’s nose into a pool. Before she can dive your child has to fill the pool up by selecting the correct picture that matches the correct sound.

As you complete each of these activities you are rewarded with prizes that you can choose from to decorate your float. Once you complete all of the games it is time to have a parade. This is enjoyable since you can watch all of your floats and balloons come down in a typical parade fashion.

Things I loved: The game provides a lot of positive feedback as your child completes each task. I purposely missed tasks to see if I got yelled at, but was surprised with a “not quite it” statement. The carnival worker also appears with a bizarre tongue-twister if he waits to long for the player to choose a game.

Things that need improved upon: I was impressed that there was not too much that I would improve. The only major flaw occurred in the beginning during skee-ball. While the computer stretched the sounds out the music was a little too high for me to hear the stretching of the word.

Also be careful not to let your child go crazy printing their stories every time they make a change. This will use a lot of your printer ink. The game also allows the player to exit by escaping on the keyboard. This will give the user free access to your desktop.

Overall this is an excellent game and is actually appropriate for the suggested age group on the box.

Grades

Graphics: A

Sound: B+ (overlap of word stretching)

Replay value: A (The game gets harder and makes you match words instead of pictures.)

Fun factor: A

Educational Value: A

Final Grade: A

System Requirements:

• Pentium II 266mhz
• 64 MB RAM
• 80 MB on hard drive
• Windows/MA