Thursday, June 2, 2011

The Letter Factory

I had high and lofty goals for teaching Z his alphabet this year, and it's been going great. I will say though that my previous post about the structured classroom setting with stickers and charts has slowly fallen to the wayside. Thus the reason I am not shy about the fact that I don't feel called to homeschool.

Still, despite all of that Z has learned all of his colors. Well, not all the colors, but the ones that should be expected from men (according to this illustration).


And I am very happy to announce that he knows all of the letters and their sounds. Not just in order or through song, but by recognition. I can take credit for about 6 of those letters, but the rest he learned when I borrowed The Letter Factor from my friend who told me this educational Leap Frog DVD taught her daughter all the letters in just 2 weeks. I experienced the same results with Z and he loves it. The way they teach the letters by associating them with a sound that a child would already recognize is genius! For example the H's are all panting because they are H H H Hot. Or Z's favorite is the letter W because he raps like a skipping record W W W W What's happening dude? So all of the sounds are easy for children to identify with. When I taught Z that the letter a says "aaa" I left it at that, but in the video all of the letter A's are scared so they scream "AAAAH". It just makes sense, and it works. I recommend this video to anyone with little ones wanting to learn the alphabet. In fact I need to go buy a copy myself so that I can give the one I have back to my friend!

4 comments:

Virginia Revoir said...

I homeschool my daughter but it's not something I really like to do. She gets so distracted by all the other ones having fun that she cries every time. Plus, she misses her friends at school. My boys go to a charter school and Ivy is begging to attend also. :( I don't mind homeschooling and I've homeschooled all 3 of my boys before, but I don't feel like it's my calling either.

Anonymous said...

I feel like I've known that about the color chart but I never saw it in print. LOL
N.L.W.

{amy} said...

Yay for Z! The Letter Factory sounds awesome!

RYC/RMC/RYC (ha ha!) ~ I look forward to reading that series. I think it's important, and people don't talk about it very much.

Anonymous said...

i love that chart- hilarious! and i am super happy that dvd worked as well for z. i hate talking something up only for it to not work the same for another person. :P but maybe since z and daisy are so similar the results were the same?