LeapReader

Update in 2020: I ***would*** like to purchase one of these for each of my niece/nephews as this has best learning toy we've found so far. This is especially since all parents of little kids right now are looking for screen free activities to engage their kids during COVID lockdown!!! Unfortunately, leapfrog is no longer supporting products for this pen. So you can't easily purchase the books/activities that go with the leapreader. So frustrating! I know they have a new "pen" called LeapStart Go, but my impression from briefly looking at reviews of that product suggest it's just not the same. The leap reader is completely screen free and encourages a lot of interaction with books (even for kids as small as 3.5 years old). ==========old review============= We have used leapreaders in our house for approx three years now. The oldest one I had finally gave out b/c the optical scanner malfunctioned. Even so, I think it's a great value and I purchased new ones for both kids. (And really, I cannot blame the company, my kid was NOT particularly careful with his LR). ******Why do I love it? It's a great way to keep young kids entertained without the use of a screen!!!****** You can download audiobooks and music via their stand alone computer based app. My older kid (approx 5 yrs) listened to a geronimo stilton mouse mystery on constant repeat during our last car trip and it kept him very engaged. (we had to beg him to listen to a stink and a junie B jones story to give us a break sometimes). My younger kid (approx 3) listened to a laurie berkener song on constant repeat during that same car trip. Of course, it is not just a mini MP3 player for kids. The interactive books you purchase are GREAT, it's not just about having the pen "read the book" for your kids. Each page of the books is interactive, so when your child touches an image there will be a corresponding sound or dialogue. It really brings books to life for them. Furthermore, there are great games/activities in some of the sets, we particularly like the body board "book" that includes a fun song about brushing your teeth and a game naming different parts of the body. Pretty much every book has an activity associated with it - for instance the beginning reader books have activities that help them with phonetics. PLEASE EVERYONE LET LEAPFROG KNOW THAT THEY ARE BEING SHORT SIGHTED. I believe the company is focusing their efforts on tablets, which makes sense market-share-wise. But they could also provide the leapreader as a choice for discerning parents that are looking for screen substitutes. Right now I've decided to stockpile leapreader supplies in case they get harder to find in the future. Keep supporting the leapreader please!!!!!! Our family LOVES them! I want to be able to give them as gifts for nieces and nephews, but it's hard to do when I'm not sure about the future of the product! (you know, since some of them are still infants).

Helps on the young kids

I purchased the LeapReader from Amazon as a gift for my 4 year old daughter. I desired a product she could use for learning on her own while I taught her older sister (we homeschool). I wanted something that got her away from electronic screens. I was familiar with LeapFrog's tag system, but we never had one so I cannot compare products. We are in love with the LeapReader. My 4 year old happily carries around her pen listening to the preloaded learning songs and is starting to sing along. For the first few days she happily played with the sample book. What comes with this system package is the pen (partially charged), usb cord for charging and downloading content, and a sample book which consists of 1 page of 8-10 books LeapFrog offers for the LeapReader. I'll be honest this was a disappointment to me because I was expecting a full book to read through. For those looking to purchase this as a gift, I would recommend purchasing an additional book so the child has something else to read in full. I have since purchased additional books here from amazon and we are enjoying go through them together. It has been a breeze to add new content to the LeapReader pen. Simply touch a page of the new book you purchased (you can do multiple books at a time), then plug the pen into the computer. The content you have 'requested' will automatically begin to download. I also purchased an audio book directly from the LeapReader content screen and was able to use paypal which made the process very smooth. The speaker on the pen is clear, feels stable and high quality, and has been easy for my 4 year old to navigate through books, audio books, music, and trivia (which she hasn't done yet). I highly recommend this product. While the LeapFrog tablet may be tempting, think about how great it can be for kids to interact with a non screen electronic and physical books.

and if I try to access it using my LeapFrog connect app, it crashes the app with following popup. my other leapreaders work well, 1/3 is bad Process: LeapFrogConnect [23731] Path: /Applications/LeapFrogConnect.app/Contents/MacOS/LeapFrogConnect Identifier: com.leapfrog.connect.shell Version: 9.0.13.20230 (9.0.13.20230) Code Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: ??? [1] Responsible: LeapFrogConnect [23731] User ID: 501 Date/Time: 2020-03-17 17:24:15.650 -0700 OS Version: Mac OS X 10.14.6 (18G87) Report Version: 12 Anonymous UUID: 7C8C9B87-6D27-F300-CDD9-E16FEDE1DE48 Sleep/Wake UUID: 9F019104-181C-44FA-AF7E-1C9558CE6A73 Time Awake Since Boot: 670000 seconds Time Since Wake: 9300000 seconds System Integrity Protection: enabled Crashed Thread: 22 GodzillaDeviceThread Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT) Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000 Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY Application Specific Information: abort() called LeapFrogConnect(23731,0x700005920000) malloc: *** error for object 0x155: pointer being freed was not allocated Thread 0:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread 0 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x00007fff7adaa22a mach_msg_trap + 10 1 libsystem_kernel.dylib 0x00007fff7adaa76c mach_msg + 60 2 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff4ec8646d __CFRunLoopServiceMachPort + 327 3 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff4ec859da __CFRunLoopRun + 1619 4 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff4ec85135 CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 459 5 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff4ded61ab RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 292 6 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff4ded5ee5 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 603 7 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff4ded5c76 _BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInModeWithFilter + 64 8 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff4c26e79d _DPSNextEvent + 1135 9 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff4c26d48b -[NSApplication(NSEvent) _nextEventMatchingEventMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 1361 10 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff4c2675a8 -[NSApplication run] + 699 11 libqcocoa.dylib 0x00000001091dfb55 QCocoaEventDispatcher::processEvents(QFlags<QEventLoop::ProcessEventsFlag>) + 2097 12 QtCore 0x0000000103e91a4c QEventLoop::exec(QFlags<QEventLoop::ProcessEventsFlag>) + 396 13 QtCore 0x0000000103e94f0c QCoreApplication::exec() + 364 14 com.leapfrog.connect.shell 0x0000000102f2d4a8 main + 3081 15 libdyld.dylib 0x00007fff7ac753d5 start + 1 ... VM Region Summary: ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=502.7M resident=0K(0%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=502.7M(100%) Writable regions: Total=3.7G written=0K(0%) resident=0K(0%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=3.7G(100%) VIRTUAL REGION REGION TYPE SIZE COUNT (non-coalesced) =========== ======= ======= ATS (font support) 32.0M 3 ATS (font support) (reserved) 4K 1 reserved VM address space (unallocated) Accelerate framework 384K 3 Activity Tracing 256K 1 CG backing stores 992K 2 CG image 36K 8 CoreAnimation 10.2M 12 CoreGraphics 8K 1 CoreImage 24K 2 CoreUI image data 492K 10 CoreUI image file 196K 3 Foundation 4K 1 JS JIT generated code 384.0M 5 JS JIT generated code (reserved) 2.6G 2 reserved VM address space (unallocated) JS VM register file 16.2M 3 Kernel Alloc Once 8K 1 MALLOC 244.0M 70 MALLOC guard page 32K 6 MALLOC_NANO (reserved) 384.0M 1 reserved VM address space (unallocated) Memory Tag 242 12K 1 SQLite page cache 128K 1 STACK GUARD 56.1M 31 Stack 23.2M 31 VM_ALLOCATE 156K 18 VM_ALLOCATE (reserved) 20K 3 reserved VM address space (unallocated) WebAssembly memory 8192K 24 WebKit Malloc 29.0M 107 __DATA 31.7M 285 __FONT_DATA 4K 1 __LINKEDIT 257.4M 39 __TEXT 245.2M 275 __UNICODE 564K 1 mapped file 53.6M 17 shared memory 2812K 15 =========== ======= ======= TOTAL 4.4G 984 TOTAL, minus reserved VM space 1.4G 984

The reviews are a bit mixed and I think that's understandable because there are times it's hard to get the device to do what you want. But it *is* possible to do what it advertises and it's really fantastic when it works, and once you have it configured it works fabulously well and your child is basically never forced to confront any of the frustration from the platform, so I won't deduct any stars for that. I'll try to break it down but will start by just saying that my 5-year-old daughter has used this for a little over a year and she LOVES it. The books have very small dot patterns embedded throughout the images on all the pages. The pen is "loaded" with data for various books and when it knows what book it's looking at, it knows what the dot pattern for that book means and it reads, from the page, whatever it's instructed to do. This might be: read the story, read a word the child taps the pen on, play a game (e.g. identify something of a color, find an emotion, find an object, do some math). There is really a *lot* of interactivity with the books through the story and games that you get with this platform. But if you don't have the book on the pen, the pen will tell the child to ask a parent to update the pen with the book. This is where it gets challenging because the software just doesn't work very well. I use it with Windows and sometimes the device isn't recognized by Windows, or the LeapFrog software can't seem to talk with the pen, or it's hard to navigate through the LeapFrog software to find the books to load onto the pen. This is (thankfully) rare, though, and the pen has reasonable capacity to store a lot of books (I have 10-20 on mine or so) and once it's set, it's ready to interact with your whole library. I think all of the frustration with this platform is in this process. Three other things I'll mention. 1) As other reviewers have said, there are some backward compatibility issues, I guess. I haven't encountered this. I originally got an older generation pen from a used kid stuff sale before I bought one of these pens (eventually I got too many books for that very-old pen to store). I fully believe this is an issue for some books + pens because I've read about it multiple times, but it's never impacted me. 2) People ask "why can't they just put all the books on the pens?" but the answer is kinda obvious if you think about attempting to support that kind of business. There are tons of books you'll never see or care about and it doesn't really make sense to build in storage for a full library of everything. And the library expands, so if you buy a pen today and a new Disney movie comes out tomorrow that your kid wants the book for, you'd be out of luck if they tried to design it this way. ("Why can't they just support MicroSD and put a proprietary format file on the card for the book?" would be an EXCELLENT question, though...) 3) The books are ridiculously expensive and you almost definitely should not buy one new. Go to your local GoodWill / Salvation Army and you'll find some here and there.

This afternoon I was trilled to receive this LeapReader, I even skipped noon snap and was awake waiting for the delivery. It didn't work right away, guess the power was all off, until after it being charged for 1 hour, the on/off button finally worked. Then I followed the quick set up card to sync it on the leapfrog.com/connect, registered a parent account and then downloaded a couple of free eBooks and music. Each page of the sampler book is about a popular cartoon, and there is a brochure in the package that introduces the books stage by stage. My 11 month old saw me using the pen to read the book twice, then she opened the book, grabbed the pen and imitated me pull and push on the page! Amazing! I am a huge fan of Leap Frog products, my little one also has the Talking Picnic Basket, The Pink Violet mobile phone, the My First LeapTop, the Leap Remote Control and a LeapPad Ultra is on the way, I'm looking forward to letting my little one try it, to get her away from being bored.

Great gift

The pencil works great. My 3 1/2 year old, who loves to read, can use it. He is able to work the reader quite easily and on his own. He will sit for an hour with it. The technology to make it work is great and easy to setup. That being said, the units seem to have manufacturing issues. The first one we got "froze" and wouldn't respond after the second use(on Christmas day of course). I tried to work through the LeapFrog customer service to reset it or something. They were completely unhelpful and slow. I ended up returning to Amazon. The return process with Amazon was seamless, as usual. The second one worked fine for about 2 weeks. Now the speaker has stopped working. The only way to hear it is to use earbuds. That isn't completely terrible, except it's hard to control the volume and I'm constantly worried about my 3 1/2 year old damaging his hearing. Besides, we've only been using it for 2 weeks and the speaker already stopped working. Very frustrating. Other LeapFrog products have been very durable and worked great. We have a LeapPad and our 5 year old has been using it without issue for over a year. The LeapReader reliability is quite disappointing.

Se presenta muy completo y fácil, cuando no lo es. Para empezar, no lo puedes instalar en cualquier windows, debe ser uno de 32bits... cuando ahora la mayoría de windows 7 y 8 vienen con 64bits. El libro que trae, es una especie de libro-ejemplo con las cosas que puedes comprar para el lápiz, pero muy básico y rápidamente pierden el interés en él. Pensado para enganchar a la gente, y tener que comprar accesorios cada poco tiempo. No lo recomendaría...

Why cannot connect to the update version of Leapfrog Connect?

Adquirí este producto para reemplazar la pluma que tenía, así que ya conocía las capacidades, pero para los que no, es un dispositivo increíble para fomentar la lectura y aprendizaje del inglés en niños. Lo mejor es que yo esperaba la pluma solamente pero contiene un libro también!

インターネットを使って登録をするおもちゃを初めて購入しましたが、何とか出来ました。 最初は上手くいかず、何度も同じ所で行き詰まりました。登録を終えてからは良好です。購入して良かったです。

Excellent divice for engaging children into books and learning to read. Purchased for my 3 and 4 year old, they both enjoy!