(G39RPQN8HK5V) Anyone who reads my blog knows how much I love reading with Roo, book play a huge part of our family life and every night we make it a point of reading at bed time as part of our sleep routine.
Now that Roo is getting older she’s getting more interested in proper story books and when I was approached by the secret agents over at The Ministry of Letters to take a look at their book Operation Alphabet I was intrigued to find out more.
Operation Alphabet is about a little boy who has just started school called Charlie Foxtrot. Charlie is finding it hard to learn the alphabet.
Two exclamation marks notice his troubles, and alert the SAS (Special Alphabet Service). The SAS live in a little red post box somewhere near Big Ben in London with the Ministry of Letters. The story follows the SAS on their mission to help Charlie with his alphabet.
The synopsis alone was enough to make me want to dive right in and read the book. However, when it arrived I simply had to leave it for Roo to open.
The team had beautifully wrapped the book up in brown wrapping paper, tied it with string and stamped a big TOP SECRET stamp on the top of it. When Roo came home from school that day I showed her the parcel, she was excited and unwrapped it and not only was their a copy of the new book Operation Alphabet but there was also a wall chart of the letters and some stickers as well.
At first the book looked a little advanced. However, the book has a great, fun and retro style about it – the illustrations are beautifully done and really bring to life visually the tale of Charlie Foxtrot.
Each of the pages are filled with members from the Ministry of Letters and I used this to get Roo looking for particular letters on each page and making their phonetic sound.
Next I looked through the wall chart and Roo had a go at naming all the letters, because some of them were capital letters she got a bit confused but she gave it a really good go in the video below!
Learning the Alphabet with the Ministry of Letters
Operation Alphabet is nice relaxed fun way of helping children to learn the alphabet and sounds that the letters make. They also have a great website where you can meat the letters, hear them talk and recite words beginning with that letter, it is very amusing. They also have a fantastic singing alphabet app where you can get kids to spell out words using the interactive app and make up music and songs based on the phonetic sound that letter makes. We’ve had hours of fun with this getting Roo to spell out simple starting words based on her flash cards and the music gets us all dancing around at home!
The Ministry of Letters website is full of information about how they want to champion learning and the alphabet in schools. There are free downloads for you to get to go alongside the book including bookmarks and at the moment there is a competition for you to design an outfit for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet as the uniform department at the Ministry is currently on holiday!
If like us you love reading and want to instil a love of books whilst learning in your kids then this is a great story. The book currently costs £6.96 and can be purchased from Amazon.
Singing Alphabet App
