Like any parent, I gave my child alphabet blocks and refrigerator magnets when he was around 2.5 years old in hopes that it will kick start his love for the ABCs… I mean, c’mon… it’s your baby, and he’s clearly a genius. Right? 🙂
Now, I saw my baby boy grow more creative every single day… building little villages and robots with his blocks and designing interesting patterns on the fridge… but each time I sat him down to review his alphabet, it just wasn’t happening. He knew the song… he could sing it as an opera, rap, and country… but as far as identifying the letters? Nope.
Until I spoke to my friend at a family party who gave birth to her son just one month before JRoc was born. She told me her little boy was already able to recite his alphabet, identify each letter, *and* write them!
HOLY MOLY your kid is a GENIUS!!! “Hardly!” she replied… “I got him the Leapfrog Letter Factory video and it worked wonders for him… see how J does with it!”
And that I did… went to the store to pick up this magical video first thing the next morning, popped it in and told JRoc we have a fun new video to watch… and it really was fun to sit thru… the characters spoke clearly and the music was catchy. And this went on for a week… after lunch, I’d plop J down on the sofa and pop that video on. And after a week, I crossed my fingers and decided to see if the magic rubbed off on my little creative angel…
I poured out the alphabet blocks from its wagon case (you know what I’m talkin about…) and nervously asked my child to pick out the letter “A”… the boy carefully looked at the wooden cubes and reached out for… “A” (omgomgomg!)… and not only did he pick out the correct letter, he even said, “The A says AH!” So I proceeded to the next letter… but I thought I’d trick him, you see… I asked him to pick out the letter “P”… and he quickly grabbed the correct cube AND again sounded out the letter! OMG I was so freakin ecstatic… we went through the entire alphabet like 25 times… and we were both soooo excited!
So now that my child was a professional alphabet identifier and sounding out-er, I thought I’d kick it up a notch and have him WRITE it… (I’m Asian… I can’t help but push my kid, OK?) I grabbed his Magna Doodle and asked him to write “DOG”… he looked at me with the biggest smile on his face and began sounding out the letters… “De…De…is D! Oh… Oh… is O! Ga…Ga… is G! It’s Dee-Ohh-Gee!!” then he carefully wrote each letter on his magnetic writing pad… “DOG”… it was beautiful… so perfect… I was in tears… and hyperventilating out of excitement overdrive.
And we continued this exercise for another 12 hours (just kidding… I took 2 short ice cream breaks) sounding out and writing short words like “cat”, “God”, “hat”, “mat”, “song”, “bed”, “best”… and more!
So if your child is ready to learn his or her ABCs… or maybe having a little difficulty with them, I highly recommend the Leapfrog Letter Factory video… once J got the alphabet down, he was reading & writing everything he could get his chubby little 3 year old hands on!!
Let me also add… my child’s reading & comprehension has been at the high school level since he was in 4th grade… and he keeps leveling up at warp speed… I don’t know if the early learning had anything to do with it, but it sure doesn’t hurt! What I do know is it had an incredible effect for his love of reading & learning!
P.S. Next stop for JRoc was to learn how to combine/blend letter sounds like “fish” and “math”… we used the Learpfrog Talking Words video for fun & quick learning. This next video teaches children that vowels act like “glue” sticking letters together… and blending letter sounds to make rhyming words… and even longer words…