The Leapfrog Label Reading System is sold as a revolutionary new product for children to learn to read. With the help of an easy-to-use stylus, the ads and reviews say, your child can enjoy the story of the book and learn each word individually as they go along, having fun and learning all at the same time. But is that really what is happening? Could your child be having TOO MUCH fun with his book? I have watched my daughter have her book for a few days and I have to say that as a parent it is easy to develop this concern.
You might think, and with perfect justification, that time spent with a label reading book isn’t, after all, as educational as it’s supposed to be. After all, what does your child do when he plays with a label reading book? You’re just pushing the page in different places and making fun things happen. It is quite possible that you can just ignore the reading part and fully focus on listening to the story, finding all the funny and strange sounds and secret things you can find, and generally entertaining yourself. Could Tag Reading really end up being just another “television”?
However, wait a second. Try to remember when you were also a child. When were the moments when you learned the most, in the easiest and fastest way? Was it when you were sitting at a desk in school, all focused and watched by your teacher and waiting to “learn”? Or was it when you were at home, distracted by something new that had caught your eye on its own, when you were experimenting and just trying things out and seeing what happened? I know what the answer is for me; I learned more and more easily when I was not expecting or seeking to learn anything.
I learned most of my geography, for example, by playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, a game that has an almost incidental touch of learning anything. It was ALL about the fun and yet I still got a lot out of it. And in geography class, well, I slept.
In addition, the tag reading system is much more than a simple reading. When a child plays with his books, he explores, takes initiative, and takes responsibility for his part in the progress of the story. They are abstract things, difficult to quantify, and yet books are good at exposing them.
So yeah, if you are a parent who cares about label reading and how “good” it really is, I encourage you to give it a try, and you know what, have confidence, not in the books, but in your intelligence in child’s budding and his ability to acquire knowledge from even the funniest and most crazy places possible. It is not out of place.