Official URL: www.schoolzone.com
List Price: $7.99
Age Range: 4-6
Rating:

In this wonderful workbook by School Zone, kids practice phonics, letter recognition, reading and basic writing skills using stickers with colorful pictures. They also learn through tracing letters, recognizing common objects and completing mazes and connect-the-dots puzzles.

My daughter and I first started using this book during a trip to the doctor’s office (for me) and it was a lifesaver! After I showed her the basic concept on the first few pages of matching the sticker picture to the letter it starts with and sticking it in the square, she was able to work on several pages all on her own. She remained completely entertained through the entire wait time and beyond. I was sold on the concept immediately.

CONTENTS

There are several different learning exercises throughout the Alphabet Fun book, all involving the use of stickers. In some, the sticker goes in a box or near the letter that begins the word depicted. A few pages are just fun scenes where your child can use the stickers intended for that page creatively to complete the picture. There is a beach scene and a farm scene, just to name two. Then as you progress through the book, there are several writing exercises with a numbered diagram showing the correct way to form the letters A through Z in capital form. There are also “follow-the-letter” mazes and tic-tac-toe games in this section. Next, it’s time to find the letter sticker that matches the first letter in the animal or object depicted or to find the sticker that matches the letter shown (they alternate). There are also pages where you put the whale sticker into the box that says “whale” or the van into the box that says “van”. At the very end there is a connect-the-dots section where the completed puzzles also double as coloring pages. The book contains a total of 267 stickers and 64 pages of fun and learning. It begins with a parent guide that gives tips for using the workbook. All the pages are perforated for easy tearing.

STRENGTHS

I personally love this workbook. It helps teach or practice phonics, letter recognition and the alphabet, all with very little parental effort. As I mentioned my almost 4-year-old was able to use it independently for over an hour. If your child is younger and has not yet learned their letters or is not proficient with “starts with” exercises, this book is an excellent tool for teaching these concepts in a fun and entertaining way. The sticker section in the back is divided into segments that are clearly labeled with page numbers so there is no doubt which stickers go where.

WEAKNESS

I could only find a couple of small weaknesses with this product, and they were so slight (and the good so far outweighed the bad), I still gave it 5 stars. First, the stickers don’t always come off cleanly. It seems their edges are not always cut completely and we’ve had a few stickers tear when we attempted to remove them from the page. Second, the stickers are divided into sections labeled with the page number where they go, but the sections are not detachable. You could cut them into their sections for easier use but if they were perforated on the page, it would prevent you from having to flip back and forth between the sticker section in the back and the page you are working on. You could tear out the entire sticker page but if you chose not to complete all of the four or five pages included there, you’d be stuck with a detached sticker page to keep up with.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Overall, this sticker workbook is an awesome invention for teaching letters and phonics. I would recommend it for the preschool-kindergarten age group and even beyond to develop and hone beginner reading and writing skills. Another great product by School Zone.