Eager Mind Letter Magnets - Review & Giveaway

"Mommy? What does M T L say?"

The question is the same she has uttered a million times already, the combination of letters always different. Once in a while she inadvertently spells a real word (or its homonym) and her delight is palpable.

C knows her letters, all the capitals and most of the lower case ones. She knows that they come together to create words. She just doesn't quite yet know how to string them together to get to those words, but she can't wait to learn.

Here to help her in her endeavors are the adorable letter magnets created by Eager Mind. These cool little rectangular magnets feature a letter and a picture with a word that starts with the letter. What sets them out from the magnetic letter pack is that each contains images that represent both the short and the long vowel sounds - A is for anchor and A is for alien. To make the sets even more entertaining, no images are repeated, so kids learn that there are lots of different ways each letter can be used.

The instant we tore into the lowercase and the uppercase packages both girls had a blast sticking the letters on our refrigerator and stainless steel oven. They assembled plenty of nonsense words and tolerated my attempts at getting them to read simple two or three letter words. Weeks later we're still playing with the letters regularly.

Eager Mind Magnetic Letter Pros:

- The quality of these letters is quite impressive. The ones that have found their way into Little L's mouth have survived nicely. They're thick enough for little fingers to grasp.
- Each set comes with the regular 26 letters plus an extra four consonants and the 5 long vowel sounds. Combine the lower case set with the upper case set and you have plenty of letters to create many fun words.
- The pictures are cute and funny, but easily identifiable.
- Very affordable! Each set retails for $8.95. At that price if your child feels limited by the number of letters you could easily expand each set.

Eager Mind Magnetic Letter Cons:

- For most kids there's a gap between knowing letters and being able to combine them into words. This set doesn't really address that gap meaning that once the child has mastered letter recognition he might lose interest in the letters until he becomes interested in stringing words together.

Eager Mind Magnetic Letter Giveaway:

I have not one, not two, but THREE sets of letters to giveaway to you my faithful readers!

To enter:
1) Leave a comment telling me which child in your life would most enjoy these letters.
2) Visit the Eager Mind website's cool letter writing practice worksheet page and let me know if you download any.
3) Subscribe to this blog's feed. Leave a comment telling me you subscribed.
4) Subscribe to my other blog's feed. Leave a comment telling me you subscribed.
5) Tweet, email, blog about this giveaway.

That's a grand total of 7 ways you can enter! Please remember to leave me a way to contact you. And please, please, please, leave a separate comment for each of your entries. I can't credit you for each of them if you don't.

Giveaway ends Friday, July 3, 2009 at 10pm PST.

I received an set of Eager Mind magnetic letters for review, but I was in other no way compensated for this giveaway. All opinions included in this post are mine and mine alone.

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