Peppa’s Alphaphonics Campervan

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a child in the country that doesn’t recognise Peppa Pig. Heck, my two seemed to know who she was before they’d even watched the programme on the television. No idea how, but that’s the power of Peppa.

We’ve had a few Peppa Pig related toys over the years and they’ve always been fondly played with by both children. What we’ve not tried before is linking Peppa in to a bit of learning, but that is what we were encouraged to do in reviewing Peppa’s Alphaphonics Campervan – and what a mouthful of a name that is.

Peppa’s Alphaphonics Campervan is designed to help children learn to recognise letters and sounds and start learning to spell. Shaped like the Pig family campervan children have 26 alphabet keys, each of which is labelled with both lower and upper case letters as well as a word starting with that letter and an accompanying picture.

A slider across the top of the campervan lets children select between 8 different games which actually gives them a huge amount of scope as to what they can do with the campervan. I’ve run through all the games in this little demo video.

Master C is about to turn four and just this week started at the local infant school pre-school where they’ve already started introducing them more formally to letters and phonic sounds. It’s therefore perfect timing for him to be trying out the Alphaphonics Campervan and as soon as he saw it his face lit up. He’s not yet at the stage of being able to follow all the games and also gets a bit confused with the slider as to exactly which game he’s playing at any one time, but with a bit of help he’s actually doing quite well with it. I’ve been impressed at how well he’s been concentrating at what he’s doing on it and also talking me through some of what he’s doing and what he’s learning as he goes.

Six year old Little Miss C is obviously much further on with her letters and sounds and instantly sussed out exactly what every game was and managed to work through them well. The same couldn’t quite be said for Mr C though. When he came home from work last night he too started playing with the Campervan and to be honest I ignored what he was up to at first, but then he told me, with a bit of a confused face, that he’s got 5 out of 6 attempts to spell a word wrong. Now knowing he’s got a pretty good university degree under his belt I was a tad puzzled.

It turns out that the problem though is Peppa’s accent as she is telling you what to do. He hadn’t realised that all the words that you are asked to spell are ones that feature on the letter keys on the campervan. He had instead just been listening to what was being said and in fairness to him when you do that it can actually be quite difficult to tell what some of the words are as the first letter sound for many of them seems to sound different from what they are supposed to be. So for instance the word “yawn” can sound quite like “lawn”. I probably hear more of Peppa in a week than he does so maybe I’m more used to her speech, but later on LMC was playing again and having heard the conversation between me and her father she too pointed out that there is room for some confusion in what she is saying.

Overall, I’m impressed with Peppa’s Alphaphonics Campervan and can see Master C using it for a fair while to support his learning at school in a fun way. The Campervan is aimed at children aged 3+ and can be purchased from Argos here where it has an RRP of £19.99.

Disclaimer: We were set Peppa’s Alphaphonics Campervan for the purposes of this review. All opinions remain my own.