Our boys are raised on Leap, Tad and the other critters that make up the LeapFrog videos. We started teaching phonics to our oldest and I partially credit their phonic usage in his being able to read sight word and fully know his A, B, Cs as well as he does. Their latest video, Letter Factory: The Letter Machine Rescue Team gets the band back together, but also amps up the education while tweaking the format.
The previous LeapFrog DVDs have the same character, Leap, Tad, Quigley and others. This is the first DVD where the characters have that 100% digital feel. The other characters were flat, old school animation and if you’re used to them then the new animation in the LeapFrog DVDs will take a moment to get used to.
In The Letter Machine Rescue Team the letter factory is reopening, which provides Leap the opportunity to cover it for a television show. The letter factory has some problems which require the team to creatively solve the problems.
Explore, design, build, test, improve and celebrate is the cycle of creativity that Quiqley lead the team on. For a DVD that is geared at 4-7 year olds I loved that it taught a very simplified version of the Scientific Method. I scoffed when I saw that the DVD taught aspects of problem solving in it, but it did and in a way that our 4 year old full understood.
It also did a good job at teaching blended sounds like, ST, SN, CL and so on. In the extras you can listen to interview from various education and programming specialists that worked on the release. It was only after watching some of those extras that I realized that the parts of the DVD was indeed teaching more complex things.
The Letter Machine Rescue Team is great and your 4-6 year old will love it, be entertained and taught something for a brisk 35 minutes. Immediately after watching it our 4 year old said “I want to see the frog movie again”.
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