Written on January 30, 2009 – 2:03 pm | by Maria Mihale |
If you have children of your own or you’ve had the chance to experience the same miracles parents do every single day of their lives, you most probably are familiar with those little things that make them feel the happiest kids in the whole world.



On the other hand, you must know how important education is, especially these days, when everything seems to be upside-down. Not to mention the fact that sometimes, due to their very busy lives and to the cliché-istic lack of time (which is almost all of the time the main cause of the distance that appears between parents and children), grown-ups often forget that the responsibility for what the little ones will become is, to a great extent, as a matter of fact, theirs.

So, if you give some of your time to your kid, then you probably had the chance to know about LeapFrog, a company that has very much to do with the so-called edutainment industry. If you don’t know what this is, then let me tell you that the word (educational entertainment or entertainment education are synonyms, and maybe now it rings a bell to you) “is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse. Edutainment typically seeks to instruct or socialize its audience by embedding lessons in some familiar form of entertainment: television programs, computer and video games, films, music, websites, multimedia software etc”.



LeapFrog has just announced a brand new toddler-sized “book explorer”, called the Tag Junior book pal, which is expected to become available starting the summer of 2009 and to reach the same success of the Tag Reading System. The latter was especially designed for the tiny hands of children, helping them not only to discover, but also to increase the interest and the love shown towards reading. The Tag Junior library consists of nine books, delivering classic stories, adventurous characters and the original titles, which will immediately win your kid over.

The Tag Junior pal is a fascinating handheld device that helps your toddler to interact with printed board books. Therefore, whenever the child touches the base of the book pal anywhere on any page, a voice starts reading aloud, combined with amusing sound effects and all sorts of songs. If you’re curious about the way this thing works, then let me tell you it has a tiny infrared camera that is able to recognize the letters, the words and the symbols that are written on a page.



“LeapFrog revolutionized the learn-to-read category with our original LeapPad Learning System, and we did it again last year with the wildly popular Tag Reading System”, said Nancy MacIntyre, the executive vice president of product, innovation and marketing at LeapFrog. In addition, she said that “the new Tag Junior handheld gives younger children, who want the thrill of independence and achievement, a learning toy that is just right for the stage they are in and really bring stories to life”.

Expected to become available this summer, the Tag Junior System comes with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $34.99, while the Tag Junior board books are said to cost $10.99 each.

(Source: crunchgear.com)