What is Leapfrog Tag?

Leapfrog’s basic tag system consists of the Tag pen and a small built-in speaker. The Tag pen is used to read and play along with Tag compatible books. The system comes with an introductory reader (Ozzie & Mack), but also offers a range of classic children’s stories, as well as licensed books like SpongeBob SquarePants, Kung Fu Panda and others. The idea is that as the child touches key words or areas, the Tag pen will speak, reading the words in the book or playing simple games through it.

Can Leapfrog Tag help children learn to read?

Within this product, and many others, parents assume that by clicking on a word, the child will hear it and learn to link what they see to this word, and they will be reading! That these products will magically bring books to life. This is not how children learn to read at all.

While this is a fun and quirky toy, anything that focuses on ‘whole words’, rather than learning how the word was ‘put together’, will not give your child the skills to read and spell with confidence. We know this from clinical studies and research conducted around the world on early literacy development. Examine the studies, or read the government reports, and you will realize that in order for ALL children to learn to read and spell, and to prevent reading failures, they must be taught specific skills. Children will not learn to read and spell by themselves, or simply by sharing books and stories with them, they need to understand certain concepts, that is, how the ‘code’ works in English.

Children who fail most of the time have poor “phonemic awareness.” This means the ability to distinguish and manipulate the individual sounds of the English language. Unfortunately, many teachers still do not choose to take a preventative approach or offer direct and systematic phonics instruction until the child is failing. Therefore, any parent who wants to prevent difficulties should focus on anything that helps their child learn the sounds of words. You may also be interested to know that research over the last decade has shown that the brains of children who are actually failing change when they are taught using a synthetic and direct phonics approach, to more closely resemble the brains of children with great literacy skills. . So now we know that as long as they are given the opportunity to learn using a good phonics program, all children can be successful. Why wait until they’re failing though? A preventative approach seems much fairer to children and will prevent associated problems such as low self-esteem and increased misbehavior. If parents and teachers knew that some US prisons actually predict future prison admission by looking at reading scores from years 3 and 4, there might be a shift in thinking and in the opportunities we offer our sons. So creating something that helps kids is great – Leapfrog Tag doesn’t currently offer them that opportunity. Also, not only do we appreciate quality resources, children also need a real person to guide and instruct them. It is actually very different from teaching concepts related to math or science. Literacy research shows this need for direct instruction in phonics.

What are the skills children need to read and spell?

Although there are a variety of skills, including the ability to really understand what they are reading, these are some essential skills. Children must learn that:

1/ Words are made up of sounds, for example cat has 3 sounds i.e. c+a+t and shout has 3 sounds i.e. sh+ou+t

2/ Sounds are combined in our speech to form words and are represented on paper from left to right using images/symbols that represent these sounds.

3/ Sometimes 2 sounds form another, for example, ‘s’ is one sound, ‘h’ is one sound, and ‘sh’ is a different sound.

4/ Sometimes a sound (on paper) can be interpreted as having two or more sounds in speech; eg ‘ow’ could have 2 meanings, eg as a cow or as a bow.

It may sound complicated, but it really isn’t. What we are trying to do is teach children the sounds of words, how to represent them on paper (letters), and how to manipulate and mix them. You can’t do that if you’re working with ‘whole’ words from the start: children need to understand from the start that words are made from sounds, and that written code is directly related to our spoken language.

Imagine if a child was asked to learn the full word ‘nip’, and then asked to spell the word ‘pin’. They can’t do it if they learn it as a whole word, because they don’t understand how it’s done. up. However, if they learn the sounds ‘p’, ‘i’ and ‘n’ then they can also spell ‘nip’ work because they would just be manipulating the sounds they already know.

Free ways to teach your child to read, write and spell

Using Leapfrog Tag and other electronic games is fun for kids, of course; however, they are likely to be confused about what reading and spelling is at a basic level; they will think of the wavy lines, the word, as a whole, instead of looking at the parts of the word. They will think that reading is more about memory and using the visual clues on the paper to guess the word.

When we teach reading and spelling, we really need to focus on the words that we say, and how they are pronounced, the sounds that are used in the words. For example, the word ‘show’ is pronounced with 2 sounds: we say ‘sh’ followed by ‘ow’. When children can ‘hear’ sounds, it’s just about learning how to put those sounds on paper. So start with individual sounds and words that can be created using individual sounds. You can start with the sounds ‘s, a, n, i, p and t’, which are the first sounds taught in Jolly Phonics (a synthetic phonetics program). These sounds are chosen because you can create many words from these sounds. . Children can learn to ‘spell’ words using those sounds, by learning to hear the sounds in words, and also to ‘read’ them, by recognizing the individual sounds on paper and reading (pronouncing) them from left to right. Correct.

Teaching children to read and spell is actually quite easy if you cut your way through the confusion (which usually comes with a price tag) and simply arm yourself with information. This product could have been really cool, if it had focused on the individual sounds of words instead of whole words. So there is definitely room for future development, and I appreciate that the product developer’s intentions are good. We all want children to learn to read and spell with confidence; however, we must use methods and resources based on solid literacy research.

When you understand the skills kids need, you can introduce and reinforce these concepts yourself, at home, in the car, while shopping, and it can be fun and FREE! Okay, maybe it’s not completely free. You need to make the cards to show what the sounds look like (the letters are really just pictures of sounds) and you can make a variety of games using a card and a pen. But we are talking about a couple of dollars instead of hundreds, if not thousands! It is something that can start as soon as the children are talking. If they are able to produce the sounds in words, then they can learn the pictures that are used to represent those sounds.

Here’s a free clip on YouTube that gives a FREE quick overview of what parents can do for themselves:

www.youtube.com/watch No links to any products, or anything for sale, just free parenting tips, and this is a free chat forum for parents run by literacy specialists who moderate it free of charge just to be a part of raising literacy standards – groups.google.com.au/group/parents-aboard/

If you buy games for the purpose of helping your child to read and spell, make sure they actually introduce and reinforce skills that we know are required from years of clinical studies and research in this field. Simply put, anyone can teach a child to read, write, and spell! You don’t need fancy electronic games and equipment, and you can often speed up the process by avoiding them, when they’re not in line with the many government reports and recommendations that parents and teachers can easily access online.