Learning CAN Be Fun.

Do any of you remember Discovery Toys? They were an AWESOME part of my childhood. Toys and games that truly were educational, helping to make learning fun and relatively painless. My favorites were the Think-Links and those little wooden shapes that you could lay out in different patterns to make various pictures.

But the best, the very best thing of all, was the Sounds Like Fun cassette tape. My sister and I listened to that all the time, had every song on there memorized.

So when, a year or so after Carl and I were married, we went to a county fair and I saw a Discovery Toys booth there, I immediately looked to see if they had Sound Like Fun.

I wasn't as impressed with some of their offerings - as with most companies, the quality seemed to have slipped since I was a child (though their marble sets were still COOL), but oh joy! oh bliss! they had Sounds Like Fun in CD form.

I bought it, for the future when we had kids. And then I made Carl listen to it on the way back from the fair. Because I am EVIL. (And yes, I sang along with every. single. song.)

We started playing it for Joy when she was a newborn, and Grace as well. Now, it is their favorite CD, and they have all the songs memorized. It has helped them learn phonics without even realizing it, counting skills, the months of the year, good manners, and how to count to 10 in Spanish, plus more.

Now they are calling it Sounds Like Learning but it's still the same CD. If you have a chance to get one, do so. It's amazing how much easier it is to memorize and absorb things when they are set to music. The fact that I have never taken a Spanish class in my life but can easily say "Good morning, how are you," and "I'm very well, thank you, and how are you?" in comprehensible Spanish is proof to that!