My sister can be so thoughtful when it comes to gifts. She’s also more like my mother in practically sparing no expense when it comes to educational tools for her kid(s). My mum got us all sorts of gadgets for learning spelling and reading. We had the classic 1980s Speak & Spell game, several electronic dictionaries and this device that I think she bought from Hong Kong where you feed in a card with magnetic stripe and it slides through and reads out a phrase and so a whole story is across several cards.
My sister and I discuss at length about the various electronics influencers tell us about. Chalk Academy, one of the first education influencers I started following when we all started homeschooling, has a Luka reading robot and I couldn’t commit to that in light that my kiddos are hardly going to be as fluent (nor I) in Mandarin. I want them to read for themselves, the way I did and love reading. The cutest reading pen out there is Habbi Habbi and there’s plenty of competition and generally, without doing my research on it, I don’t want a Mandarin-only Simplified Chinese pen. Further, for the reading pen technology, although not exactly the same, we have the Leapfrog Leapreader pen, only compatible with Leapreader books and I found myself Googling “how to hack Leapreader pen” and I didn’t get any results and I wouldn’t embark on that anyhow!
As an aside, my sister is all-in on Leapfrog with the cell phone, tablet, cash register (I gave it to her as I was gifted a second one), Leapstart Learning Success Bundle book thingy and a 100 Chinese words Leapfrog electronic “book”. I also have the Chinese one.
I heard about Tonie Box from lifestyle blogger/influencer Jean Wang (Extra Petite) and it was one of the two my sister mentioned, along with Yoto Player that I had never heard of. She offered something of the like as Baby’s third birthday present. Aside from the higher cost of Tonie Box, I am leery that the kids will use the figurines as toys more than educationally. Cute as heck, though. As a gift, I was going to request the Yoto Mini. Also, Baby doesn’t even have her own room or counter space. The Yoto Mini was something I envision them sharing and it’s been the right decision.
I couldn’t hack the protective case so I bought that. That $40 card case that is essentially a credit card holder but multiple-per-page though ….
What I did:
I bought Avery trading card sleeves (10 sheets, 9 cards/page) for $7.50 although the pockets are 2.5″ x 3.5″ and Yoto cards are the same size as credit cards: 2.125″ x 3.375″. They were slipping around and out.
So using cardboard, the back of pads of paper which the kids don’t want to scribble on, I cut 2.5″ x 3.5″ cards and slipped them behind the Yoto cards, decorated them with fun patterns and finally affixed them with double-sided tape so only the Yoto card is budging.