As a preschool teacher to four year-olds, I’m intrigued with one of Wonderbrains’ new products, Alpharings. Alpharings are designed by Educational Insights, an educational product company that has a 50 year history of providing hands-on activities to reinforce early learning skills. Alpharings come with 130 adjustable plastic illustrated rings (five of each letter) and an instructional guide.
So, my first question was, why so many rings? Well, each letter is represented by five different illustrated rings to give the child five different relationships with the letter. A child can find all the letter “Cc” rings, for example, and place one on each digit of a hand. It is a great way to integrate sorting and classifying with the alphabet, and these are important pre-math skills as well.
This set is also wonderful for children who tend to reverse certain letter pairs, such as p and q or b and d. Children can easily compare the two letters in the pair by putting them on each hand. The full-color illustrations on each ring are easily recognizable for each letter, so being able to identify b and d is a snap.
As children progress with their learning, these rings become excellent tools for working on word-building skills. With the availability of multiples of each letter, words such as “tot” and “moo” can be built. As children work on longer words, such as “letter” or “school”, these rings can be a great tool. Older children will enjoy working on spelling activities with Alpharings. They are a concrete tool that can be utilized in a number of ways over a wide range of age and development.
Alpharings retails for $19.99 and is a bargain at that for the variety of activities and age span that can appreciate and benefit from this product.