Don’t you just love it? Going to a garage sale and finding that “excessively marked down” newbie. It’s like getting a package in the mail, when you see it… sitting there amongst the junk.

Like these: There’s over 2 complete sets of these alphabet, magnetic pieces. And they cost me A DOLLAR total. (We already had the double-sided magnetic white board that I’ve been using for teaching – it cost me $12 on Amazon.)

Now I couldn’t find the exact same tiles online, but in the teacher store these guys were between $20-25 and in the online store they’re anywhere from $20 to (this almost made me cry) $55. FIFTY FIVE DOLLARS! (You can get the exact same set on Amazon for a sale price of $41, but even so FORTY ONE DOLLARS?!?!)

[Though I think ours are better than these tiles because ours click together, making the concept of a word being a combined set of letters more concrete.]

I’ll take our dollar find any day!

And Rachael’s already learned how to recognize Abi’s name through just playing with them for five minutes. No, the child can’t spell, but in our homeschooling she has just begun decoding words through their letters as I spell them and distinguishing them from other words. (We’ve been working on decoding color names to the completion of the word, not just recognizing by the first letter or two.)

So these little tiles will have much life in our household as the concept of reading and building words is, oddly, feeling closer on the horizon. Crazy to think that the child is only 3.5 years old and is beginning to show signs of beginning reading skills.

Nice to be able to keep up with her little brain with a dollar find. 😉

I’m looking forward to starting to have her build the color words next as I spell out the color aloud.

Yay for fun, cheap, effective and non-bulky materials!