Helpful Mom

If you are a parent you most likely know what I mean when I mention the name Leapfrog or a Leappad.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Leapfrog is a educational toy company that makes THE best toys.  I am an absolute fanatic about them these days.  As a mom of young children that is going to try her hand at homeschooling I am always looking ways of teaching the girls through play.  And so far I haven’t come across a Leapfrog toy that I haven’t liked, or my kids either.  They have a line of DVDs teaching phonics which has already taught my 3 yr old all her letters and their phonic sounds, and my 4 yr old is learning to spell and read 3 and 4 letter words using their Word Whammer, Word Launch, and Easy Reader Phonics kits for the leappads.

I now search out their old products on Ebay for all the coming stages of learning.  I think the more ways of teaching them the various things like reading, writing, and math the more fun and easy learning will be.  They have made a great cash register that teaches them coin denominations and sings songs that teach them different things like the fact that 10 pennies make a dime, and 2 nickels equals a dime, etc.  The girls love to play with it on it’s own, but it can also be used in conjuction with the leapfrog shopping cart, which comes with food you can actually scan on their cash register.  We haven’t gotten that fancy yet, but we do have a toy shopping cart from a garage sale and play food for their kitchen.  So sometimes we’ll play store and buy all the play food in the house, including the utensils and pans.  Bag them up with real grocery bags and charge them with those plastic credit cards that come on CC applications. (small tangent, we are not teaching our kids to just charge their stuff, we pay bills in full and earn 3% back from the CC company)  But it’s just a simple fun way to play and through that they are learning about what the different coins are and how much they are worth.  They even have fake coins that have what look like real coins in the center of a colored ring so they can really learn which coin is which.