Guest Author - Diane Claus

Guest author Jeanette Norman



I always wanted to buy a LeapPad product for my kids but the only ones they had out were ones that read to you as you passed the pen over it. I thought this would be a waste since we read so much already together. Then one day at a local store, I saw a new LeapPad Plus Writing. I had been working all summer trying to get Wesley to write his name and start recognizing letters and sounds. I thought this would be perfect for him.

If you buy this product it comes with 2 books. One book is like an overview of the products available for your LeapPad. It has samples from other books. The other one was the Reading, Writing, and Math: A Collection from the LeapPad Plus Writing Library for Pre-K thru 1st Grade. If you are purchasing this for a child 4 and older, this is a good starting book for them. It has letters to trace and pictures to point at. There are a few letter games, tracing the letter A and some numbers, and math items.

For the writing part, there is an actually pencil that you put into the writing wand. I was disappointed that it didn’t disappear after a few seconds of writing. It comes with an eraser so you can erase over their work. But even with this one annoyance, overall I am extremely satisfied with this product. You don’t have to put the pencil in the writing wand for it to work but this allows the child to see his work. Some books I would recommend using with this are:



This has all 26 letters in upper and lower cases and some maze games. Wesley doesn’t like doing the maze games but he loves doing the tracing pages.



This will start your child out with basic math skills like counting, tracing numbers, and looking for patterns.