Best Toys

The Melissa and Doug See and Spell set is a learning / puzzle game that is a great way to introduce young children to letters and words. This set contains seventy two wooden letters that are painted five different bright colors; green, red, yellow, blue and purple; and eight, two sided wooden boards that have different pictures on them with their corresponding three or four letter words cut out so that the little child playing can fit the brightly painted wooden letters in to their recesses. After your little learner conquers the eight two sided wooden word boards he or she can use the seventy two wooden letters to learn many other words. It also comes with a wooden storage case so that when the game is not in use your little guy or girl will not lose any of the pieces. Learning games and educational toys have become very popular and are a great way to give your child a head start for their upcoming school career. The Melissa and Doug See and Spell game is rated for children age four years old and older and the convenient wooden case measures three inches deep by six and a half inches long by fourteen inches wide.

We asked a local preschool teacher and a local kindergarten teacher to test out the sets in their classrooms and then asked them questions after a week as a rather non- standard Melissa and Doug See and Spell review. We figured that this would be the best way to find out just how well they work and how kids received them- we figured we’d get the most data from two classrooms full of kids. In a way, we were right. The teachers had some definite opinions about the set. They thought that the colors were very bright and colorful to catch the kids’ interest, and the pictures were very well drawn so that they kids didn’t have any trouble figuring out what the pictures are.

To see for ourselves, we decided to go ahead and conduct a more traditional Melissa and Doug review by visiting the classrooms ourselves to collect our own data. We came in to the classroom at alphabet learning time and sat at the back of the classroom. The kids sat and very quietly dumped the pieces out of the puzzles and then put them back on their own. They had a week to practice with the puzzles before we came to watch, but they were not experts at reassembling the puzzles yet. The Melissa and Doug See and Spell puzzles were still a challenge after the teachers had worked with them for a week, but the kids were still interested which means that they had not become discouraged. It was a learning process, just like anything else in school. We were impressed with what the kids had grasped after only a week though, and we would highly recommend the Melissa and Doug See and Spell set to any parents who want to give their kids a head start on their letter learning.