First Words is part of the Froobles Magnetic Play and Learn series of books which also features shapes, counting and colours. The Froobles First Words by Ella Davies is perfect for Lara who, approaching 3 and a half, is starting to learn to spell.
The book features 10 hard board pages, each with a picture of some of the Froobles fruit and vegetable characters. Each page has a single sentence that I read to Lara and in the sentence there is a highlighted word that I then ask her to spell.
At the top of each page that word is marked out in large grey letters and your child has to find the correct magnetic pieces to fill in the spaces. The words are all three or four letters long and are all words with strong vowel sounds, some short vowels and the occasional long vowel noise such as "ee".
Lara very quickly grasped the context of the book and set to work filling in the gaps. By the end of the book I suspect she had worked out that she didn't need to spell the word herself because it was printed in grey before her! However, she does invest a LOT of concentration scouring the table for the correct magnetic letters to place on the page and her face beams when she finds them all and the word is complete. We take great pleasure in grabbing all of the pieces from the page before turning it to work on another challenge.
Lara is now quite familiar with the Froobles characters and I think this contributes to the fun she has when using the book.
I don't know how you would achieve this but I can't help thinking that there would be an extra level of challenge if you could hide away the greyed out letters to make your child try and spell the word themselves without a prompt. Perhaps a pop-up flap could do this? while I appreciate that there is still a LOT of learning value in copying the letters of a word, I think that without this added challenge, Lara may very quickly grow out of this book as she has already learned to blindly copy the letters she sees in front of her instead of sitting down and trying to work out in her head the sound of the next letter she needs to find.
First Words (Froobles Magnetic Play and Learn) has a RRP of £5.99.
The book features 10 hard board pages, each with a picture of some of the Froobles fruit and vegetable characters. Each page has a single sentence that I read to Lara and in the sentence there is a highlighted word that I then ask her to spell.
At the top of each page that word is marked out in large grey letters and your child has to find the correct magnetic pieces to fill in the spaces. The words are all three or four letters long and are all words with strong vowel sounds, some short vowels and the occasional long vowel noise such as "ee".
Lara very quickly grasped the context of the book and set to work filling in the gaps. By the end of the book I suspect she had worked out that she didn't need to spell the word herself because it was printed in grey before her! However, she does invest a LOT of concentration scouring the table for the correct magnetic letters to place on the page and her face beams when she finds them all and the word is complete. We take great pleasure in grabbing all of the pieces from the page before turning it to work on another challenge.
Lara is now quite familiar with the Froobles characters and I think this contributes to the fun she has when using the book.
I don't know how you would achieve this but I can't help thinking that there would be an extra level of challenge if you could hide away the greyed out letters to make your child try and spell the word themselves without a prompt. Perhaps a pop-up flap could do this? while I appreciate that there is still a LOT of learning value in copying the letters of a word, I think that without this added challenge, Lara may very quickly grow out of this book as she has already learned to blindly copy the letters she sees in front of her instead of sitting down and trying to work out in her head the sound of the next letter she needs to find.
First Words (Froobles Magnetic Play and Learn) has a RRP of £5.99.
