Okay, maybe not ever, but I really love this thing. It’s actually been several weeks ago that I bought this on a whim. I was at the store already getting some school supplies and what not when we saw this in the toy section.

Word Whammer It’s by Leap Frog and it’s called a Word Whammer. There are 3 settings: letter hunt, word builder, and word hunt. The letter hunt setting will say the letters that are put in and what sounds they make and if a word is spelled, it will say the word, too. On word builder, the object is for the child to put in three letters that form a word. The Word Whammer will say all the sounds then the word that was spelled. And on the word hunt setting, it will say something like, “let’s spell the word ‘cat,’” and the child is supposed to try and spell it. If they don’t get the letters in there after a few seconds, they get a hint, like, “the letter ‘t’ sounds like ‘tuh’” or “the letter ‘a’ is red.”

It’s been a great learning activity for Elijah and keeps him quite busy from time to time. He likes to spell the same words over and over, though. This is because there are some “favorite” words of the Whammer (like cat, dog, pig, mom, dad, etc.) that get an extra sound byte. But for all his sounds, it’s helped him get some of them straight, though with the word hunt, sometimes he has a hard time distinguishing between the letters t, g, p, b, etc., that sound the same when you say just the letter. It’s kinda funny sometimes, though, because we’ll hear him in there yelling at it, saying, “I’m looking for it!!” or “I can’t find it!” or “I KNOW!” or “WHAT!?”

We’ve also seen that, uh, it ignores some words. Like “sex” or other three letter words you might be able to come up with. If you plug them in, it doesn’t even ask you to press the letters to hear the word you spelled. Cracks me up. It does know “God” though, pronounces it funny, but it knows it! (Well, “knows,” is programmed, whatever.)

Another thing that’s nice is rhyming. I’m not sure when it decides to do this, if it’s for certain words or just randomly or what, but sometimes it will ask you to remove the first letter and replace it with another to do a rhyming sound. Once, I think Elijah had “bit” or something in there and it told him to rhyme so he replaced the “b” with an “a” which, of course, isn’t a word. The Whammer just went “that’s a funny sound!” But then, of course, we could explore “lit,” “mit,” “hit,” “pit,” etc.

So I just thought I’d share that, this isn’t a sponsored post or anything. I’d seen my friends have the single letter magnet thing by Leap Frog before, but this thing is so much better. And I think Elijah’s the type that learns better with the interactive activities, maybe, so, yeah, it’s been good for us. So I skipped a lot of his learning-to-read book and now he’s working on sounding out three letter words.