Galloping Minds - Baby Learns Alphabet and Phonics

Baby Learns Alphabet and Phonics from Galloping Minds is a wonderful educational DVD for young children. It prepares babies and toddlers for reading and school. The suggested age that will benefit most from this DVD is age 1 - 4 years of age but you can never start too early familiarizing your baby with the alphabet. Baby Learns Alphabet and Phonics introduces children to the alphabet in an easygoing and gentle way so that your child won't be overwhelmed or over stimulated. They start with the letter A and show a video or sometimes an animation of a few objects that begin with that letter. Every few letters they recap what your child has learned which reinforces the lesson. The animations and videos within the DVD are excellent. My son really enjoyed the clips of the live animals throughout the DVD. What I, as a parent, liked the most about the way they taught the letters is that they not only said the letter but they also said how the letter sounds phonetically. This is essential for when a child is learning to read and there are so many educational toys and DVDs that don't teach the phonetics. Something else that this DVD does is it shows the printed letter in both capital and lowercase forms. The DVD is 44 minutes long, I try to put it on around bedtime for my son since the classical music in the background is soothing and I've heard that children retain more right before they go to sleep. I have really seen progress in my son that is directly related to the Baby Learns Alphabet and Phonics DVD. I own a few of the Galloping Minds DVDs and I have been pleased with all of them. They have really benefited my son greatly and I would highly recommend them to any parent who has young children.

This is great to learn, however it is very Boring babies wil stop watching it after 2 minutes. I get bored watching it, but like I said I love the way they show you the letters and the item that match with it. Really best ones are Leap Frog Learning DVD, can't go wrong.

I bought 3 DVDs and 2 flash cards package hoping to make a super kid out of my 2-year-old. To my surprise the Alphabet and Phonics DVD did not offer any creative teaching tool. Little ones learn better when the information is packaged in the form of music,songs and some dance. This DVD had no songs or action, just some elevator type background music. It fell short of any PBS kids programs. My son didn't pay attention after 10 minutes. The flash card is very attractive but a 2-year-old might find some unfamiliar animal names and words. I found similar flash cards at Walgreens for much cheaper price. I didn't want to open the rest of the DVDs or flashcard, I sent my purchase back and got a refund.

Like many other parents I bought the whole DVD set hopeing that it would help my children. (3 and 20months) To my dismay these DVDs were very bad quality in deed. The graphics didn't attract my 3 year old son at all, and he barely watched for 5 minutes before running away. My 20 month old daughter watched for a little while but some of the odd graphics actually upset her to the point of tears. The alphabet DVD is too long and not visually appealing enough to make children of these ages want to watch. I strongly reccomend that if your child is near or over 2 years old, don't bother with these DVDs.

Granddauther (age 2 1/2 likes this one. She repeats what is said in the DVD which means she's following it closely.

This is one of his favorite DVDs and one of my best purchases. I got it for the phonics and was impressed that by the end of the first watching, not only was my son already asking for it to be played again, he really retained the information. I've bought loads of other stuff from Amazon along these lines but this is one of the few packages that I was genuinely happy with. For such a reasonable price this is a great buy and I recommend it to all.

My four year loves this DVD. Its very educational for little ones. It is fairly simple and in my opinion effective for teaching the alphabet. The music is calming and the letters and words are also spoken in a calm manner. As a parent I was looking for something educational and this fits the bill. A reasonably priced DVD.

I don't enjoy writing a negative review on any product. I'm usually one to "not bother" complaining. BUT, this item is not worth what I paid for it. It's doesn't help my daughter focus on the alphabet. She just watches the images and simply learns the names of whatever the picture is like "apple" or "elephant", which are things she already knows because she's almost 4 y.o. I was hoping this video would help her remember the names of the letters and how they sound. But it didn't. This video is better suited for children between 1 and 2 years old.

I find this DVD very educational and interesting. All my grandchildren have enjoyed watching this DVD and are fascinated by it. As a retired English teacher, I recommend the DVD since it covers uppercase, lowercase letters and phonics. Each video segment is accompanied by the spelling of each word which facilitates word-recognition. The kids enjoyed all the animals shown in the DVD. At the end of a few letters, a recap of the letters helps the kids remember what they just watched. It definitely helps reinforcing their abcs and is great for preschool learning. I also noticed the dvd has a calming effect on the kids. The DVD is long - over 40 minutes - so well worth the money.

A slow series of words. Powepoint quality. My 15 months old infant sees it but says it's a bit boring.

Its not as good as other DVD I have purchased its kind of weird the words they choose a baby would struggle to say or acknowledge these words. The characters to are weird, it looks like something someone made up on there computer i could make it up myself!

After discovering the poor quality of the Galloping Minds numbers DVD I immediately regreted having bought these two together and decided to watch this one on my own, before subjecting my small grandson to it. I'm glad I did because it would have bored him out of his mind. If the producers had trouble making ten numbers interesting, imagine the challenge they had with 26 letters. First of all, all letters are presented as a set of one upper and one lower case letter side by side. In other words, A is Aa, I is Ii, G is Gg, K is Kk, etc. For a child trying to pick out letters in his environment this is useless, because when will he see KK, Ww, Bb anywhere as fixed pairs? The child is not told that these are two ways of writing the same letter. Then there is the problem of associating a picture with a sound and then using the wrong pictures. I figured out that K has something to do with a bike, but what does P have to do with a clown, F and T with a robot, S and X with a jeep, or Z with a bicycle? Whatever does a hat have to do with an egg (for Ee)? Besides the very poor graphics in general (any twelve-year-old creates better graphics), the letters themselves are wobbly, tumbling, bursting, twirling, and constantly morphing. The human figures are kinky and the "girl" looks like she's 23. It gets more and more monotonous and unless a kid is buckled to the seat of plane, I doubt if he would watch it to the end. The music is overpowering in some places and in others sounds like it is just trying to bide the time. Overall the educational intent of these DVDs is spurious to say the least. Someone just wants to make money off parents hoping to keep their kids occupied. The real treat is when two packages of GoGurt are used to demonstrate the letter Y (yogurt).

I was very disappointed in this DVD. I hadn't realised it was American in origin, eg 'Diaper' for nappy. Also does not follow phonics approach currently taught in schools in the U.K. Both Capital and small letters are introduced together and the phonic sound is only mentioned very briefly at the end of each example. In U.K. schools only the small letters (lower case) are taught to begin with and linked directly to their sounds. Also some examples are confusing for a child just starting to learn phonics, eg 'The first example for 's' is 'sheep', which does not start with the sound 's'. The first example for 'a' is aeroplane! On my copy it does not seem possible to go directly to a letter of your choice,, except for a selected few on the opening menu. You have to fast forward to find the one you want.