Disclaimer: We received this item for the purpose of this review. All opinions are our own.
Erin, at the moment, is one of those children who wants to learn. In January she will be moving up to the 3+ room at nursery and from then, she will be spending time with the reception class in school and joining in with learning things like phonics. Erin has shown an interest in letters and words for quite a long time now and I want to help encourage her at home. We were kindly sent the Thomas And Friends Alphaphonics Tablet recently and it came at such a good time for us.
To start with, the tablet needs 3 AAA batteries and while it does come with some, they are only really for the ‘try me’ purpose in shops. It is recommended that these are changed immediately after purchase to ensure your tablet works the way that it should do.
Thomas And Friends Alphaphonics Tablet has large handles at either side and this makes it great for children to hold or to carry around with them. Erin is forever moving her toys around the living room or dining room and some we even take away on holidays with us. I think the design of the tablet is really well thought out as it’s child friendly and also makes it easy to use for either left or right handed users.
There are 7 different activities to choose from and these can all be found right at the top of the tablet. You can choose an activity by sliding the yellow tab across. It’s big enough that Erin can do it on her own so older children definitely won’t need any help although they might need guidance on what each activity is.
Underneath the activities there are another 3 buttons. You can press ABC at any time to hear the alphabet, the music note will play fun music and the repeat sign will repeat whatever the last sound or question was. I think this one in particular is really helpful as Erin can get distracted while being asked something and then soon forgets what it was she was meant to be doing.
Here is a quick description of the 7 activities:
1- Word and sound
2- Name and phonic sound
3- Find a character or object
4- First letter of a word
5- Phonic letter from a spoken word
6- Copy a sequence of funny sounds
7- Choose a button and listen to the sounds
At nearly 3 years old some of these activities are a bit too hard for Erin at the moment. This isn’t something she can play with on her own so we spend a lot of time trying to learn something new together.
Together, we spend our time listening to the words and sounds and trying to match them where we can. Erin knows what most of the pictures are apart from maybe the characters so we work on picking them out together. Erin can also pick out some of the letters on the board on her own because we have been working on them already so we try to find these and also learn 1 or 2 new letters at a time.
Although there is no on/ off button, the tablet does turn itself off after around 2 minutes. I really like this feature because sometimes Erin will leave a toy somewhere and forget about it so I don’t have the chance to turn it off. Having this one turn itself off is great because it’s one less thing for me to remember!
The Thomas And Friends Alphaphonics Tablet is something that we’re only just beginning to use so I can’t comment on how well Erin gets on with each function. However, what I can say is that it’s something that can be used in enough ways to make it a toy that children will get a lot out of! I can see this being something we use more and more as Erin moves up in nursery and starts to learn more in the way of letters and phonics.
Buy the Thomas And Friends Alphaphonics Tablet here: https://amzn.to/2T3DbvV