Recently, Darius got his latest learning toy – Leapfrog’s Fridge Words™ Magnetic Word Builder.

Catherine had come across this toy on the Web and thought it would be a nice addition to Darius’ possessions. Although this Word Builder is meant for kids between 3 to 6 years of age, I believe there’s no harm introducing it to him earlier.

Of course, we are not expecting him to be able to form words or anything by himself. Instead, we are only expecting him to treat it like any other toy he has, except that this Word Builder should help expose him to alphabets and phonics. It will be a win-win situation where he has fun with the toy while subconsciously learning more about alphabets and words. ^^

When we first presented the toy to him, Darius kept pressing the Music button located at the lower left of the gadget, which will make it play the ABC Song (it’s still one of his favourite songs). In the end, he was only fiddling with the music button instead of exploring the alphabets. -.-|

To resolve this, I covered the button with blue-tag surrounding it, before sealing it up with a small piece of cardboard and transparent tape. This has helped keep Darius’ distractions away. ^^

ABC Song 'sealed'! ^^

Regarding the Word Builder, it comes with three slots for the child to place the alphabet pieces into. As each piece is a magnet by itself and the slots have metal behind them, it makes placing the pieces into the slots much easier.

There are three learning modes available, consisting of the simplest Load a Letter mode, followed by the Word Play and then the Word Building mode.

While in the Load a Letter mode, the corresponding letter will be read out whenever an alphabet piece is placed into any of the slots. For the Word Play mode, any correctly placed 3-letter word will trigger the word being pronounced and a song with the word (possibility of forming 325 different words). For the most advanced mode, the Word Building, the toy will randomly read out a word and the child will try to form the word correctly.

With these modes of varying difficulties, the Word Builder makes for a very durable learning toy, and I will recommend it to the parents of toddlers and pre-schoolers.

These days, we place the Word Builder on our fridge, where it will stick to it sturdily due to its strong magnetic force. We will also place several letter pieces on the fridge door so that Darius can interchange the letters if he wants.

So far, he has been quite interested in the Word Builder, though like towards other things, his interests will usually last for a few minutes before he moves on to explore other stuff, only to return again after some time. ^^

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