Parents and educators will fly for Rooby’s ABCs. Rooby Roo, the kangaroo, flies through the alphabet helping players practice letter and sound recognition, alphabet sequencing, and build early reading foundational skills.
Gameplay is simple and fun! Players take turns selecting letter tokens from a bag (no peeking!) and then matching either upper case or lower case letters on the five alphabet boards. Corresponding pictures to letters show beneath to assist in the learning process. For example, A= apple, B= ball and so on. The player to complete the board, or place the last letter token on the alphabet board, keeps the Rooby Roo token. The player with the most Rooby Roo tokens at the end of the game, wins!
Rooby’s ABCs reinforces sound-letter correspondence and teaches early phonological awareness skills. Phonological awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds. Many studies consistently confirm that phonemic awareness along with letter recognition are the two best early predictors of reading success. This early learning game reinforces these exact two foundational skills.
For more advanced game play, “cover tokens” are provided so that players must match the chosen letter token to only a picture (the letter is covered), teaching more sound (or phoneme) recognition. When our 4 year old toy tester chose the letter “I” she was feeling a bit unsure of where her token should go. She cleverly sequenced through the alphabet pointing and singing her ABCs, until she got to “I” and reassured herself.
“I found it. I – ice cube. It goes here!”
Finding “extra ways” to play was fun and easy too. We practiced other phonological awareness skills like syllable segmentation by counting the number fo syllables in target words. We continued with initial phoneme isolation by generating other words that began with the same sound. For example, “C = cow” and “C= cat.” Lastly, we practiced an even more advanced skills called phoneme manipulation. This is when a child can change a sound in a word to make a new word. For example, “change the “c” in cow, to a “h”… what do you get?”
Rooby’s ABCs is a wonderful learning game to reinforce the most important pre-reading skills in preschoolers: letter recognition and phonemic awareness. Players were learning, practicing, and having fun all while preparing them for the next step in literacy. This is a great game choice for parents and educators!
