I had seen these books advertised so I was very pleased when Santa left this in Ethan’s Christmas stocking!
The speech therapist we saw in September had told us that we needed to work on animal sounds with Ethan to try to see if we can get him to copy us. She said to do this we should just point at animals in Ethan’s books and tell him what the animal is and make the sounds. This sounds an easy task but the problem is if you show Ethan a book he expects you to read him the story and he knows if you aren’t doing it right which can cause him to get frustrated.
With this set you get the story book and LEGO duplo bricks to create the farm animals, this therefore meant that Ethan got a new book and I can work on not only animal sounds but his motor skills with the duplo and hopefully build an interest in this as I used to love playing with LEGO when I was younger and it could mean I may get the pirate ship set that I wanted so long ago…
I started by putting all of the bricks on the floor for Ethan to look at. This isn’t his first duplo set so this wasn’t a new thing for him. We then read the book and I made up the animals for Ethan making all the animal sounds as we went, for each page you make a different animal from the story. We will work on Ethan building them but I didn’t want to get him frustrated and then not listen to the story.
Its only a short book, five pages long, which is great because if Ethan gets obsessed with this book and we have to start reading it continuously it isn’t long enough to drive us all mad.
The great thing about this book is that it shows you which bricks to use on each page in 100% scale so, depending on the ability of the child, you could get them to find the bricks needed for each animal and they can place them on the page ready to start the build. So as Ethan progresses I will be able to ask him to find me the red brick, which colour brick do we need now etc. This is something that will defiantly grow with him and his learning process.
Overall I think Ethan really enjoys this book as he has brought it to me many times and has played with all of the animals we built for quite a while.
There are only three of these sets out at the moment and I do hope they look into making some more. I know we will be looking to purchase another one in the future.
