Caillou: Ready to Read

Enter into Caillou’s imagination, and you can follow his adventures! Caillou likes to pretend he’s an astronaut, a chef, a pirate, a detective and a hero. Each of the five adventures contains two different games to play. As players complete each game, they earn coloring sheets that can be printed out.

Pros

• Games can be done in any order, easy to jump around
• Different types of short games keep players from getting bored
• Can be played over and over without repeating
• Printable coloring pages
• Flashcards provide additional reading practice

Cons

• Some of the words can be tricky for preschoolers
• Alphabet game doesn’t give examples of both upper- and lower-case letters

A Variety of Games

Each game addresses a different skill: rhyming, beginning sounds in words, matching a word to a picture, unscrambling letters to make a word, filling in a missing letter, and more. Having a wide variety of different things to do keeps players from getting bored. Also, the games are very short, so it’s easy to earn the coloring pages. The whole thing can be played in less than a half hour.

It’s All About Control

There’s no set starting or ending point; players can pick any game to start with and can jump around as they please. My little one kept going back to the same two or three games that she really enjoyed.

Play Again and Again

Each time you go back to play a game over, the words change, so you’re not playing the exact same game over and over. Kids can play multiple times, without memorizing the answers from the last time they played.

High Success Rate

Kids get lots of encouragement as they play. There’s no penalty for wrong answers, and no time limit, so they’re pretty much guaranteed to complete each game if they try all the possible answers. There’s also a help button that will repeat directions if they need it.

Skills Needed

Computer Skills - Players will need to be able to move a mouse and click. Two of the games require dragging an object. One game requires moving your mouse to avoid objects.

Reading Skills – Not all of the words in the game can be sounded out. Many are “sight words” that rely on knowledge of vowel combinations (like “bear”, “key” and “shoe”).

For the Little Ones – Caillou’s Alphabet

In the same package, you also get Caillou’s Alphabet. This is geared for young children, with no reading required. There are 26 games, one for each letter of the alphabet, and all of them involve recognizing and identifying upper- and lower-case letters.

Everything I liked about the Ready to Read game is also true of Caillou’s Alphabet. No penalty for wrong answers, no time limit, no identical games every time you play. Players only need to be able to move a mouse and click – no dragging – though a few games involve clicking on a moving object.

The only thing I would change in Caillou’s Alphabet would be to provide examples of both upper- and lower-case letters. In all but one of the 26 games, only one example is given, either an upper- or lower-case letter, but not both, even though players are asked to find both.

Bottom Line

This software grows with your child, with two games in one. Young children just learning the alphabet and preschoolers learning to read words will both enjoy these fun, easy-to-play games.

Recommended ages

Caillou Ready to Read: 4-6
Caillou’s Alphabet: 3-5

Other Details

ESRB Rating: E for Everyone: Edutainment
Retails for $19.99
Play in English, Spanish or French
Runs on Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, XPsp2 or Vista; or on Mac OS x 10.2 or newer