Elmo's Alphabet Challenge product reviews

As a former New Entrant teacher, and currently the mother of a five year old daughter and another 3.5, I thought I was the ideal person to review an alphabet video. My daughters both love Elmo so were very excited to see I had Elmo's alphabet Challenge for them to watch.

The DVD starts of with Elmo, Telly and Abby in Sesame Street I their usual Muppet form. They all find themselves inside Abby's Fly Pad (her iPad) solving the alphabet challenge to get back home. They work their way through the alphabet doing a couple of letters in different types of computer games that we are familiar with like Pacman, Super Mario, Guitar Hero and more. They are looking for things that start with the letter sound. My girls were engaging with the DVD throughout. So it was helping my younger daughter to learn her letter sounds and my older daughter the confidence to solve the challenge with their Sesae Street friends.

I love how the emphasis is on the letter sound as well as the letter name. The big downfall with this DVD and so many other alphabet books and DVDs is that it teaches the capital letters ignores the lower case letters. As any New Entrant teacher will tell you it is more important to learn the lower case letters for reading and writing.

The bonus feature is an animated alphabet storybook. It is actually lots of short stories each featuring a letter. The text on the screen for this is correct in the use of capital and lower case letters. The books are read in childen's voices and although the animation is very basic my girls were glued to the screen. It also helped that we had some of the stories in book form already.

The DVD also comes with a poster featuring Abby, Telly and Elmo framed by the alphabet (both lower case and capital letters). This poster and the DVD case can be used with a free iPad app to bring Elmo to life. I don't understand the technology behind it but if point your iPad camera at the poster or DVD cover the an animated 3D Elmo appears and talks to you. You can enter your name (but only in capital letters) and take a photo so that the cover/poster says "Staring you and Elmo." The other part of the app is a short clip featuring a couple of the letters from the DVD.