LeapFrog Letter Factory Adventures Amazing Word Explorers review

We’re big fans of the LeapFrog series of DVDs.  It threw us for a loop when they improved their animation to more of a CGI style, but that was a much needed leap for the better in hindsight.  Their latest DVD from the Letter Factory Adventure series is Amazing Word Explorers.  It continues on the quality and throws the familiar plot formula for a bit of a twist too.

The Letter Factory is where Leap, Tad, Lily and their friends hang out and learn about things.  Leap is a reporter who usually scores a story from the letter or word adventure that the gang ends up doing.  In Amazing Word Explorers they’re going camping in the mountains to see a meteor shower.

It all goes fine with the group playing rhyming word games on the way up to the top.  It’s done with short lyrical elements, cute dialogue and interactions with forest animals. When they get to the top of the mountain the formula that viewers familiar with the LeapFrog series gets shaken up.

Usually there’s a problem like the letter machine breaking down or their rocket ship running out of fuel that causes them to get creative and expand on what the DVD is teaching.  In Amazing Word Explorers Leap encourages them to use their imagination as they play a game of cards.

The game of cards is actually an exercise in storytelling that teaches children how to effectively tell a story.  They have to use their imagination and figure out a character, location and three elements of something happening that move the story forward to a logical conclusion.

When I first saw this I was confused because I want our children to learn sight words, their alphabet or basic math that the LeapFrog series normally teaches.

They kept playing the card game and expounded on the storytelling elements.  Once they broadened that they brought is sight words and rhyming words to demonstrate that words that rhyme can easily be switched out for different words.  These different words could even be placed into a story to shake up how the story begins, ends or who is the central character.

I see what they did there.

It’s because they shook up the usual formula and made it more creative-and advanced that this was one of the better LeapFrog videos we’ve seen.  Our 5 year old is knee deep in rhyming now in his PRE-K class.  He loves to rhyme and this video was perfectly timed for him because of that fact.  Our three year old still enjoys the video, even though most of the grammar and sight words are beyond his age level.

The Amazing Word Explorers DVD teaches rhyming, storytelling, word building, has some sing-a-long videos and curriculum commentary for parents on the DVD too.  It also comes with a digital download code so that you can take the show anywhere.  As it is in comic books, this is an awesome feature that I look for in children’s entertainment because it allows you to have a physical copy and a cloud copy as well.   It runs 37 minutes and retails for $14.99, which is a deal if you’re getting it for a three-year old because they’ll get at least two years of enjoyment out of it.