Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

One of the hardest things to do while trying to teach your child to read is keep his/her attention. Well this game offers the opportunity to do it. The little popcorns are cute and the box is exciting. The game LOOKS fun. I believe the instructions for the game are pretty straight up. You know, you pick one to read, and then he picks one to read. Whoever has the most when you get tired wins. Also, the instructions say that when a "POP" card is picked, the player loses all his cards. BAD IDEA. That will not make the game fun. Instead, when we find a "POP" card, everyone has to stand up and pop around the room like a popcorn. Now this makes reading the cards exciting. The normal player instructions are a little boring for my 4 year old, too. But throw in his noirsy trash truck that gets to haul off the popcorns he earns, and it becomes a blast for him. Add a few imaginary products (like pink elephants, dog paint, dust mite houses, whatever) that he can buy with his earned popcorn currency, and it gets even better. For an imaginary rabbit my son will read any card he can. Then he wants to read one to get the rabbit food, an imaginary collar, a rabbit hutch, and on and on. With this approach I get tired way before he does. My son is 4 and is reading 1st grade level with absolute ease. This is mostly because of starfall.com and morestarfall.com , but these cards help him with the words that can't be sounded out so easily. These words have to be memorized... like the word "please" and "who" and "where" and "the". Other words in the game are: big, run, ran, if, to, today, what, then, well, ride, see, little, do, this, into, now, and, went, could, on, no, said, pretty, at, my, is, there, fun, all, say, are, under, some, soon, be, he, that, it, a, and an. There are 100 words in all, I think. We generally only play with about 15 at any one time, so there is repetition so he can remember them. I recommend this game if you plan on playing WITH your child, and often. There is no way a kid can learn anything from these all by himself or with another child.