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