*The following features gifted products but the opinions are all my own*

I thought teaching reading was a simple thing. I thought that although there may be quite a few tricky (so called “red words”) I can probably teach the two of my kids how to read without much direction. Turns out I was lost.

I thought fitting homework into daily life would be easy. I thought there would be plenty of time between coming home and bedtime. Turns out I wasn’t realistic.

I thought getting my kids to interact in educational toys would be a doddle. I thought they would just follow my lead and get involved in all the fun with me. Turns out they have other plans.

As a parent you have to come to terms with the fact that, despite all the planning and structure you may put in place, you’re going to have to do a lot of improvisation. You’re going to have to come up with different ways to go about meeting your objectives. One such example is with reading/phonics and generally engaging with words. Quite simply, they usually just don’t have any interest in reading their school books. They may need an alternative way in.

Most of my income streams rely on my writing abilities, so I would quite like if the both of my boys followed in my footsteps in some manner. I’m trying to raise a couple of word wizards and I’ve recently been introduced to the Magicube Word Building set.

The Magicube sets are a series of genius magnetic cubes that come in a variety of different versions. This particular ones focuses on letters and provides all the inspiration you need to help children to reinforce their learning and get a better understanding about how to spell and sound out words.

Our eldest (Cameo, 5) is a pro at three-letter words by this point but our youngest (Marlo, 4) is just getting to grips with the idea of blending sounds and figuring out how exactly words come together. The two of them love to play this together with Cameo teaching his little brother how to spell the things shown on the cards.

In the box you get a set of blue, red and yellow cubes, a load of different double-sided letter cards and a set of object cards. All of these are magnetic and attach to one another, giving you infinite opportunities to mix and match everything together.

It’s a great group activity for them and it makes for an ideal alternative to just reading or writing, as it makes them have to think about the words in different ways and consider the different potential words they could make by playing with the letters.

As much as I enjoy doing educational activities with the boys, I need them to be able to crack on independently too. I can’t recommend this enough, based on the couple of times we’ve used it so far. The boys love being able to show off what they can do with letters and this is the kind of activity you can leave them alone to figure out on their own without much intervention.

You can get the Magicube Word Building set from Toys R Us. It’s a great investment and a very good gift for a 4-6-year-old child.