Monday, May 12, 2008

Learning Letters: Three Cheers for the Word Whammer!

I taught my daughter her ABC's using mostly playdough, paints, sand, and crayons.  But she's had a hard time distinguishing little b, d, q, and p.  So today I bought her the Leap Frog Word Whammer.  My cousin, who homeschools her five kids, raves about this toy, and so I thought I'd try it.  It works fabulously!  It comes with lots of upper case fridge letters, and I got the lower case letter expansion set.  Because I want her to interact with lower case letters, I took away the upper case ones and left her with the little ones.  She has had so much fun putting the letters in the Word Whammer and hearing the letter's name and sound.  AND you can't put p, q, b, or d into the Word Whammer in any direction other than the correct one (like, you can't turn d upside down and make a p), which has been helpful.  (For the record, I am not stifling this child's creativity by saying there is a correct way to put the letters, as I fear some will judge.  We do tons and tons of activities in which she makes the type of connection she's making with the p, q, b, and d.  All day long she grabs 2 similar objects and exclaims, "2 bottles!" or whatever it may be.  And so, never fear, we already have a major emphasis the other direction).  This toy has also been great for reviewing her letters and their sounds in general.

1 comment:

Uberly Ewe said...

We have yet to get the Word Whammer. But we do have the Letter one that hangs on the frige, and we do have all the Leap Frog Videos, Letter Factory, Word Factory, and on and on. My son learned the letters by watching hte Letter Factory Video. HE Still loves to watch that thing and I will pull it out from time to time. He likes to say, "The A says "AHHH" the A says "AHHH". Every Letter makes a sound, the A says "AHHH" It is so cute!!!