Active, hands-on learning with letters and words is made easy with Phonics Tiles. This large electronic toy features rows of letter tiles that store in individual slots and a Learning Board at the top of the unit. Children place the tiles onto any of five spaces on the Learning Board to hear the letters named and sounded out. Depending on the mode of play, children can listen to songs about the letters and associated objects, explore phonics sounds and build words, play a game of identifying letters and their sounds, or spell requested words.
Phonics Tiles provides plenty of opportunities for learning at different stages of reading readiness. Children just getting comfortable with the alphabet will have fun pulling the tiles out of the slots and returning them to the correct pouches. Caregivers can encourage them to associate the uppercase letters with the smaller lowercase ones, as well as the letters with objects that begin with the letter (found on the back of each letter tile — for example, a bird is on the back of the "B" tile). The toy provides a nice opportunity for exploring alphabetic order. If children place a tile onto the Learning Board with a picture-object face-up, the toy recognizes and names the object. An identifying game can be played with the pictures and the letters. Older children will enjoy building words and spelling requested words.
In Song Mode, little ditties about each object or letter are played. Children can place an assortment of letters and objects onto the Learning Board (up to 5) and then press the "play" button to hear a string of short songs. In Explore Mode, children can simply hear individual letter sounds or they can attempt to build words. Even invented words are sounded out, and if the toy recognizes a real word, it not only sounds out the word, it says it.
This electronic toy is very "smart". It recognizes children's progress and adjusts the challenge levels accordingly. For example, when children have picture-tiles on the Board in Game Mode, the first request might be, "Press the bird", and later, "press the word that starts with B", and then, "press the word that starts with 'bbb'" (the phonics sound). The lights under the tiles on the board help out in early stages—they light up in order to direct children to the correct answer. In Learn Mode, children are asked to spell words. The words begin at a basic level and advance at a reasonable pace. Word families are explored before moving up to the next level. For example, after spelling "cat", kids might be asked to spell "bat" and "hat" before moving to "man".
Phonics Tiles can be spread out onto the ground or on a table, or it can be mounted on the wall. Although the unit works fine and looks good on the wall, we found it easier to work with the tiles with the unit spread out on the floor. That way, we could easily keep the letters out of their pouches.
The most significant weakness of this electronic toy is the fact that it contains only one tile of each letter of the alphabet. This means that users cannot explore double letter combinations, such as "ee" or "oo", and they are unable to spell words containing repeated letters, such as "mom" or "pup". The toy recognizes over 600 words, and our experiments yielded decent results with most real words. Although the system recognized "push", it didn't say the word for "bush". A less significant weakness is the absence of a "repeat" button that would have been useful for repeating the word children need to spell in the Learn mode.
Most of the toy's features impressed us. The automatic leveling system, mentioned above, is advanced and very helpful. We were also impressed with the fact that many letter blends are recognized so that, for example, if the letters "s" and "h" are placed side by side, they are sounded out as the "sh" blend. Even "tch" was recognized. This is helpful for parents who are interested in teaching and reinforcing letter blends. We also enjoyed the fact that the toy is not as "impatient" as many electronic learning toys on the market. It allows enough time for children to explore and come up with an answer before shutting down or repeating its request. Another very thoughtful feature is the volume control system. Parents control the overall range via a switch on the back of the unit (they can choose either a "low" or "high" global setting), and children control the volume within that established range using a volume dial. Another excellent design feature is auto switch-off in addition to an on/off button. The toy remembers progress from the last session, but it can also be reset via a switch found on the back of the unit.
