Melissa and Doug's Wooden Alphabet Magnets

A new blogger we've been watching recently is Jennifer Lance, who discusses natural and earth-friendly toys on her blog ecochildsplay from her home base in northern California. She recently recommended Melissa and Doug's wooden magnetic letters, and we couldn't wait for the chance to second her endorsement. We love these letters, and have two sets; each set features painted wooden sets of both capital and lowercase letters attached to full magnetic backings. We've had ours for so long we take them for granted - in fact, the "ZRecs" button in our sidebar is a Photoshopped photograph of those letters on our refrigerator! (Note: Our link for this product credits her Amazon store, not ours - she relies on Amazon sales to make money blogging, just like we do.)

Jennifer has a pretty consistent oppositional stance to plastic toys, which readers of this blog know we couldn't live without, but in other areas we share many of the same priorities. Reading a recent post about her search for an all-natural doll had us in stitches - her gentle tone and exhaustive narrative speaks volumes about the proper way to communicate our parenting priorities to well-meaning relatives, as well as about just how far we'll go sometimes to find a toy that meets our family's needs. (Remember: Whatever you get your child, if they like it they will play with it for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. So make sure you like it too.) Better still, Jennifer went above and beyond in her thoughtful assessment of this toy, offering little insights that showcase the strengths of this pragmatic idealist and her very young blog.

For one, Jennifer highlights an added safety bonus of using Melissa and Doug's magnetic letters: Unlike those plastic letters with little round magnets plugged into the back, these are safe enough to use with much younger children, despite their official 3+ rating; just keep your kids from chewing on them. As we did with Z, Jennifer states that she used these magnetic letters in her home with children as young as one.

But Jennifer is also a former K-8 teacher and is a graduate student in early childhood education, and dropped this tidbit near the end of her post:

In my experience as an early childhood educator, it is best to introduce young children to upper case and lower case letters at the same time. When they are learned separately, I have observed more confusion from the children.

Whoops! We have been using only the capital letters, thinking it would be easier to pick those up first. We will throw the lowercase alphabet into the mix!

Melissa and Doug is a great company to do business with, by the way. It may interest readers to know that although each set comes with 52 magnetic letters, and we have two sets, ours actually add up to only 103 pieces. When we opened our first box, we discovered that a single capital letter had separated from its magnetic backing. We called the company and they sent us a whole new set, no questions asked. We have bought many other Melissa and Doug products (we blogged about their brilliant cutting board set) and have almost always been happy with the quality of their toys. (We'll talk about the exceptions sometime when we blog about the limitations of wooden toys.)

Check out ecochildsplay whenever you're looking for a natural approach to toys from the perspective of an off-the-grid mom with a background and strong interest in education. We know we will.