New Tag books

Tag has some new books for learning short and long vowel sounds.

You know I love the whole LeapFrog system. My son learned so much from it when he was little.

So when I received these book kits, I was excited.
What I discovered, however, is that you have to:
a) Find your Tag reader (difficult enough, if you have the kind of kid I have - which is to say, not particularly organized).
b) Find the original box in which you've kept the Tag cord and CD.
c) Go through the books one at a time and download audio for each one from the LeapFrog website.
d) Save it on your Tag reader, ensuring you don't go over 20 MBs.

I managed to get 13 books on my reader before it told me I was over my limit.

Then I was ready to begin. Now, if I was the child, all of this would be transparent to me. My parent would be doing all the work. (So like life.)

The books look pretty good. Kids can read each one, using the Tag reader (by pointing to the words or letters, or the page icon to let it read an entire page out loud).

There are games in the back of each book that reinforce the ideas from the book. For instance, help a cook find ingredients for his "short-a" cookies - all the ingredients have the short-a sound.
So all-in-all, Tag is a pretty decent value for the money, and worth the up-front work to prepare it for your child.

If you want to know more, here's an awesome, in-depth review on the Tag system by KidsTechReview website. They give it 4.5 stars out of 5.

Disclosure: LeapFrog gave me a Tag system and the books to review. However, I don't work for them or receive monetary compensation from them and I'm free to write whatever I want about their products. If they sucked, I'd tell you - or more likely, I just wouldn't blog about them.

Product review - I'm going to have one or two of the neighbourhood children try this product, and the books, out. Then I'll let you know what they think. Much better than hearing about it from me.