Bob has had several educational toys and over the last few months I have bought a couple of products that help with letter recognition and learning sounds.

I am quite critical of these products because of my teaching background. If a company is going to make an educational toy you would think they would do some research into phonics and how children learn to sound out. I am fed up of toys telling Bob that the letter N makes the sound ‘Nuh’.

When I was asked by Junior Scholars If I would like to review some of their educational toys I was interested if they would meet my high expectations. 🙂

The first product that I have been sent to review is Letter Factory Phonics by Leap Frog. This is for children aged 2 and above and it helps to teach them letter sounds, names and recognition.

The box contains 26 letters, all lower case! this is another issue I have with early years toys. I know that children also have to learn upper case letters but they learn to recognise lower case first so why would you want them to be upper case? I have seen toys that only have upper case letters and it has made me not buy them.

You have to choose one to click into the top of the letter factory. You then press the letter and it sings a song telling you the letter name and the sound that it makes. Imagine my delight when they sang, ‘Mmm’, ‘Nnn’ & ‘Sss’!

Bob loves this toy! She has recently learned the ABC song and she loves singing along to it with the Letter Factory. She is also learning a lot! Within a day she could sing along to the letter name/sound song and could recognise the letters s, k and o. This is a brilliant toy and it should help her to recognise all of the letters over time.

Disclaimer : I was sent the product free of charge for the purpose of this review but all opinions are my own.

 Posted by Charlotte on March 10, 2014 Activities  Add comments

  3 Responses to “Letter Factory Phonics”

  1.  

    That sounds fantastic – I’ve got fed up with a few of our toys for similar reasons; there’s one that asks you to find the letter “en”, and it just isn’t how Kitty approaches language!

  2.  

    Isn’t she lovely!! People seem to forget that children learn in a specific way and at different stages, I had a friend who’s little boy was distraught that he couldn’t make a certain sound he was being taught at school. They took him to speech therapy and it turns out that because of how a childs brain forms he would not have been able to make the required sound until he was a couple of years older!!

    (I realise this would be better if I could remember the certain sound but I’m afraid I can’t!)

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