Learning Magnets High Frequency Word Kit from Barker Creek Publishing Company

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

With school in full swing, there is very little that gets me more excited than browsing through a catalogue of teacher resources, pop-out letters and bulletin board sets. What really catches my interest most are the various manipulatives available today that help elementary students progress in their learning by stimulating their kinesthetic intelligence. This is probably due in part to an innate preference I hold towards being able to manipulate tactile objects and using my visual-spatial strengths in everyday applications. Even as a young child, I remember being drawn towards the sand box, building blocks and puzzles when others would prefer to curl up with a book or two. Reading and writing, I hate to admit, were never my forté and it took many years of studying French, Italian and Spanish for me to have a better understanding and appreciation of English grammar, syntax and linguistics in general. Looking back, I struggled with writing and reading while growing up, and now that both my kids are in school, I fear that they may experience similar difficulties. This is why I am grateful to have had the chance to review the Learning Magnets High Frequency Word Kit from Barker Creek Publishing Company.

Barker Creek Publishing Company is a small, woman-owned business located near Seattle, Washington. They have created a wide-variety of really amazing products including books and manipulatives designed to help children learn essential skills such as their great line of activity books called Draw Write Now that are suitable for children ages 5-12. They feature drawing and handwriting lessons tied to a particular topic, as well as interesting and relevant information about that topic. And if you're a classroom teacher, you will absolutely love their selection of classroom borders, name tags, awards, charts... The list goes on!

When my kids and I sat down with my nephew one weekend during a sleepover, I decided to pull out the Learning Magnets High Frequency Word Kit and challenged them to come up with sentences using any of the words, which are colour-coded to indicate articles, nouns, verbs, etc. The colours made it easy for me to coach the kids and helping them find words that made sense depending on the grammatical role they played within the sentence. They also made it easy to create new sentences by simply replacing a green word (a noun) with another green word to either form a plausible sentence or one that was completely ridiculous.

I love that the kit comes with a magnetic Kidboard but with more than one kid, it was handy to have a couple of baking tins so that everyone could get down and linguistic with these word magnets. From punctuation marks to suffixes, this kit has it all including a set of Make Your Own Words. Being able to manipulate and physically handle the words really engaged the kids and made it fun for them, which is always a huge benefit. This kit is just a sample of Barker Creek's line of durable Learning Magnets that can help students learn basic English reading, grammar, and math. With the high number of ESL / ELL students at my school, I am excited to be able to share this set with my colleagues. I also love that Barker Creek has 40 Spanish Nouns with Pictures that match their 40 English Nouns with Pictures, as well as a grammar poster set that was developed alongside Seattle University's post-grad ESL department.

Barker Creek Publishing Company was kind enough to send us a Get Organized! Go Green kit that comes with 12 letter-sized folders, 50 sheets of computer paper and 45 self-adhesive labels. When it comes to getting organized, I'll take all the help I can get. I'm totally crushing on this stylish Hot to Dot kit:

To all my teaching counterparts, whether you teach in a school or in the home, I am very pleased to offer you a chance to win your very own Learning Magnets High Frequency Word Kit that includes a Blue Magnetic Kidboard, High-Frequency Magnetic Words, Make Your Own Words, Sports and Games, Our Planet Earth, City and Country, and Planes and Trains, a value of $69.99! Simply enter using the Rafflecopter form below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: I was sent product to help facilitate this review. Any opinions expressed in this post are my own.