My Word Magnets offers 4 different kits of magnets.
You can choose from the Ultimate Edition Kit and the Light Edition Kit for older members of the family, or the Kids' Edition Kit and the Kids' Super Bundle (which is the kit I was privileged to review), which are both for younger children. The Kids' Super Bundle comes with 381 Word Magnets, plus 15 custom Word Magnets. When you are at the Word Magnets Site you can enlist the help of Wendell the Wizard to choose your Custom words if you so wish and you get to play in the sandbox, which gives you and your child an idea of how you will be creating sentences with your magnets. You may click here to go to my Back to Preschool Sponsor Spotlight post to see what I had to say.
Each Word Magnet is approximately 1/2 inches high and 1 mm thick. The length varies depending on the word. The words that are included in this Kit include Sight Words and Fun words and other words, plus word fragments such as endings (ed, ing, s) to help create words that make sense in the sentences you will be building. It also contains two sets of numbers (0-9), punctuation, and math symbols. What I thought was wonderful for the kids' edition, is that they color code the words. Red are verbs, green are adjectives, blue are nouns, and orange are others. In addition to the Word Magnets themselves, the kit includes a sturdy storage case that has a clasp on it to keep it from opening and a Super Safety Board on which to use the magnets (because there is no way my girls are taking this product out to the kitchen to use them on the refrigerator so they can lose them all).
The magnets in the My Word Magnets Kits come attached together as sheets that you will need to separate.
In order to make the separation process a fun activity, I decided to take the magnets and organize them a bit. I wanted to see how many Sight Words were included in the kit. I was pleased to see that most of the Dolch Sight Words are contained in this Kit, though there were some missing that still have me wondering why they weren't included. There are no number words, just the numerals. And I believe a lot of the nouns can be found on the Dolch Noun List, which I just discovered the existence of this evening. So the selection of words the children will be working with will really help their reading. As they play with these magnets they will become familiar with the all important sight/high frequency words in a fun way.
I did want to mention that I noticed, while separating the magnets, that it is better to bend them backwards and forwards instead of tearing them apart. The tearing motion left the edges more ragged.
Now, I bet you are wondering how the children like these Word Magnets. As I said, they loved helping separate them into piles. When we initially separated the magnets I would hand one to Tabitha or Amelia and have them tell it to me. I then found it on a sight word list I had printed out and had them put it in the correct pile. At another time, when we were ready to build sentences, I had them separate them by color, so it would be easier to find the correct part of speech we were looking for. Not that the girls understand what nouns, adjectives and verbs are right now, but I can see where just playing with these magnets they will have a better understanding. I had to restrain myself from trying to get all technical on them.
They enjoyed separating the words into piles.
This is Tabitha's first attempt at writing some sentences with the magnets.
She was pretty proud of herself.
Amelia really wanted to get in on the action.
And then she wanted to do one of her own. At this point she is just putting words on the board, but I need to find a chance to work with her. I feel this will be a great tool to help her in learning new words and practicing sounding out words.
Here they are again, taking up the entire table sorting out the words by color.
I decided we would try some of the game suggestions in the instructions.
We played Scrambled Egg Sentences.
I think I started out a little hard actually. Tabitha wanted to make it say, "The princess is beautiful happy." When I was looking for, "The beautiful princess was happy."
So I made them a little easier. Even Amelia got in on this game.
She made this sentence, and I explained to her we would need to add a question mark.
Then we rearranged the words to answer the question.
And Tabitha decided to act out being a funny dog.
They had a blast making Super Silly Sentences and Adding-a-Word.
Then I had them complete some sentences. I gave them 3 words to choose from.
There are quite a few games we didn't play.
Word Riddles
Scavenger Hunt
Guess the Connection
Describing Words
Improvisations
and
Triplets
There are so many educational opportunities with My Word Magnets. I plan to use them to help Amelia practice reading words in a fun way. Tabitha is starting to see how sentences are formed. And she has talked about (though she didn't get a chance to) writing the sentence she created and giving it to a friend. I love to see them so excited to learn.
If you would like to find out more about My Word Magnets, head on over to their site. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
Wait! There's more!
If you are thinking this would be a wonderful gift for someone you love, My Word Magnets is offering a special discount for what they are calling "Gray Friday." You can get
30% off each of these bundles plus 10 FREE Bonus Word Magnets by using the code shown:
MYGRAYFRI12BUN Kids' Super Bundle
MYGRAYFRI12ULT Ultimate Edition Kit
MYGRAYFRI12KID Kids' Edition Kit
MYGRAYFRI12LIG Light Edition Kit
MYGRAYFRI12ULT Ultimate Edition Kit
MYGRAYFRI12KID Kids' Edition Kit
MYGRAYFRI12LIG Light Edition Kit
Disclosure: I received My Word Magnets Kids' Super Bundle for free in order to review it. This did not in any way influence my review. I only recommend products I use personally and feel will be a good products for my readers.
I never realized how many things you could do with word magnets - they are so versatile!
ReplyDeleteI love that! That would help my son out SO much learning to read! Amazing review, thank you!
ReplyDeleteWhat fun! I love all these educational but fun things. My kids would love this too.
ReplyDeleteI love love love how each part of speech is a different color. That's a great idea!!
ReplyDeleteAmanda
http://myfourlittles.com
I love this idea! And how educational...and fun! I'm impressed with the quantity of words and love that they come with different colored parts of speech and punctuation marks!
ReplyDeleteI love that there are so many words to choose from! Looks like hours of fun :)
ReplyDeleteI absolutely--absolutely adore this. I can't say how many hours I spent copying and cutting out words to do this very thing when I was homeschooling my kids. I really could have used this in 1990.
ReplyDeleteI need to check this out! My daughters will spend hours writing each other notes with this...
ReplyDelete