Pros: Tons of fun activities, award certificate, nice illustrations.
Cons: None!
The Bottom Line: Have a preschooler? Want to give them a scholastic advantage? Pick up Alphabet Puzzles And Games. It’s not only entertaining, it’s educational as well!
Freak369's Full Review: Alphabet: Puzzles and Games Books
My sons have long since outgrown alphabet and number books but that doesn’t stop me from purchasing them for my next door neighbors daughter. She's a precious little three year old that simply loves to write letter and numbers so when I came across the Homework Helpers series at my local educational store, I thought it would be nice to get her the K-1 series of books so she could get a jump start on other kids when she starts school. Since she’s here every day I wanted her to have something constructive to do in between watching The Wiggles and serving afternoon tea to all the stuffed animals. Needless to say, this is one of her favorite books from the K-1 series. I am a strong believer that if education is made fun a child will retain more information. One of the best assets of this book is that it is 100% kid friendly, some parental assistance might be needed to read the instructions but for the most part kids can pick this up and figure out what to do in a few minutes.
Alphabet Puzzle And Games
This book will help kindergarten and first graders learn the basics of the alphabet and numbers. The activities range from letter mazes to connect-the-dots, finding hidden letters inside an illustration and her favorite, coloring the pictures using a color and letter chart. This is the activity that is most common in the book and helps children with letter recognition. An illustration is divided up, sort of like a puzzle, and a child is asked to color certain parts to reveal the ‘hidden’ animal or object. This is taken to another level when kids are asked to color only certain parts of a picture one color [like a purple pig] by finding the letter “P” in the illustration. This helps them learn about doing things in order, when they get done coloring all the sections that are marked with a “P” then they can color in the rest of the image.
Later in the book kids are exposed to basic words and asked to find them hidden in a picture or to make their way through a maze or path by picking out words that start with a certain letter. One of the cutest activities is “Grandma’s Goodies” where five items all starting with the same letter [in this case “P”] are hidden in the picture. The word is spelled under the image and its up to your child to find it and color it in. This is a great way to expose younger kids to common and familiar words – in this puzzle they’ll learn pie, pencil, pen, pig and peanut. There are several of these towards the end of the book and they are a lot of fun for kids to complete. The connect-the-dot puzzles use both small and large case letters instead of numbers so kids are constantly exposed to the alphabet through the various activities.
The thing I like to most about this book is that it starts off with very basic lessons like “What Lives In The Ocean” where a starfish is hidden inside a photo. The letters “C” and “D” are in the different sections and a child is asked to solve the question by coloring the “C” sections in blue and the “D” sections in yellow. These are also done using the same letter only one will be large case and the other small case. The size of the book is also great – 9 x 6 1/2 makes it the perfect size for small backpacks or when you want to take something along to entertain a child when you will be dining out or need to occupy them for a short period of time. The larger workbooks and activity books are nice, but the smaller ones are great for younger kids since they don’t have to fumble with the pages when turning them. The pages aren’t perforated so if your child wants to do the activities outside the book, you might want to rip them out for them.
You can wrap up the book with the cute clown award certificate located on the last page of the book. This is a great way to reward a child for a job well done and helps to boost their ego a little. All of the letters of the alphabet are scattered on the page with an area for your childs name, your signature and the date. If you want to get really creative you can copy this on to colored paper and frame it or put it in your childs scrapbook.
Color Insert
In the middle of the book you’ll find a two page color insert. The first one is a frog hopping around lilly pads with directional arrows showing the correct path. If you have any dice at home [or even a spinner from a board game] you can have them roll the dice or flick the spinner and work their way through the lilly pad. The second page has 26 color pictures [one for each letter of the alphabet] that kids can use to play the lilly pad game [instructions are provided in the book] or they can be used for other games with other books in the Homework Helper series. At first I thought these were stickers and I spent about five minutes trying to peel the edges apart, trust me on this – these aren’t stickers [and I have the paper cuts to prove it].
Things To Know
With the exception of the color insert in the middle of the book, all the pages are black and white. You have permission from the publisher to photocopy that pages providing that they are for home or school use. If you are planning on using these with younger children, you can enlarge the images about 20% so they will have more space and the images will be larger. This is also great if you have more than one child in this age range, even though these are inexpensive [between $2.49 and $2.99] it’s a lot cheaper to photocopy them – especially if they have a few favorites that they want to do over and over again. Another nice perk of the book is that each page has a space for your childs name, so if you are making copies of these or using them in a school setting, there is a dedicated space for the child name and even a little extra room for their room number.
The Bottom Line
The Homework Helpers series of books make early learning fun and allow kids to retain more information than standard workbooks. The small size makes it kid friendly and the fact that they are black and white and can easily be copied is a definite plus. These books retail between $2.49 to $2.99 and are well worth it. If you can’t find these at an educational bookstore you can order them online through the McGraw-Hill website. To check out other books in the series, feel free to visit the McGraw-Hill website here: www.mhteachers.com. If you are planning on homeschooling or just want to jumpstart your childs education, this is a great book to get them started and following up with others in the series is a great way to build a solid educational foundation.
Stats
Name: Alphabet Puzzles And Games
[A Homework Helpers book]
Author: Kathy Zaun
Pages: 58
ISBN: 0-7682-0690-1
Price: $ 2.49
Help is here! Alphabet Puzzles and Games Homework Helper provides children in kindergarten to grade 1 with extra help learning the alphabet. Packed fu...More at Buy.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.