Friday, April 1, 2011

I ♥ Leapfrog

My oldest son wasn't interested in learning the alphabet. He did learn the letter E very easily since it was the first letter in his name and he loved finding that all important letter everywhere. I tried flash cards, made a cool alphabet book, and tried to introduce letters whenever I could but it just didn't appeal to him. Leapfrog Letter Factory changed all of that. Say what you will about how the video teaches them that B say "buh" instead of the really short B sound, but Tad, Leap, and Lily taught my kiddos both how to read. I loved that my little guy learned phonics at the same time as he learned the alphabet because I think that's what really made it click for him.

After the Letter Factory, we switched to The Talking Words Factory and Talking Words 2-the Code Word Caper. Now, I will admit that I'm one of those awful parents that used the time he watched the videos to clean or catch up on household chores instead of watching with him. So imagine my surprise when he came into the kitchen and started demonstrating how to write silent E words with his fridge magnets. Within a period of two months, he went from not caring about his alphabet to knowing all the letters and reading simple words. And my younger daughter that watched the videos with her big brother is three and a half and reading early readers already.

Leapfrog doesn't work for everyone but I love that these videos are interesting and also tie in well with the fridge magnet sets and other leapfrog toys. You can also check to see if your library has the dvds so you can test them out without risk.

One note here--there are some videos that are similar to the ones that worked very well for us, but they are not quite the same. We watched the Alphabet Adventure video once and i thought it was harder to follow that the older Letter Factory. I also think that they shortened the title of the second Talking Words video to Word Caper

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