Step right up! There's a carnival in town starring Clifford the Big Red Dog. In CLIFFORD PHONICS, early readers join Clifford and his friends as they attend the Birdwell Island Carnival, a special carnival full of booths and rides that teach reading. Youngsters play the activities to win "prizes" to use in decorating a float for the culminating Carnival Parade.

In one of the six major activities, the Ferris wheel isn't working because it has run out of power -- "word power" that is. Players motorize it by identifying words in specific word families. Other activities cover letter and sound recognition, rhyming, sentence completion, word-object association, and sight word matching. These activities level both up and down, depending on how the player is performing.