Product: Trader Joe's Alphabet and Number Cookies

Letter cookies are a great way to entice your child to sound out letters and make up goofy words.
My mother brought us a plastic tub of the Trader Joe's Cinnamon Schoolbook Cookies. These have been a lot more fun than I thought. First, Isadora thinks they are a very tasty treat (a vewy tasty and delicious tweat, says Isadora - still can't get those R sounds). But they are also a great way to play around with phonics. I'll grab three or four letters after she is done with lunch and I'll ask her what word we're going to find in our letters. I spread out the letters in front of her, and while I probably would have inhaled them without caring what kind of word they spelled when I was a kid, she actually looks at the letters and tries to make sounds. All the while, dancing excitedly around the kitchen, in anticipation of inhaling them.
"Guh!" says Isadora, pointing to the letter S. Well, I didn't say that she knows how to sounds out words already, but she is making that connection that letters make sounds. "Mmmm," she says, pointing to the letter M. Okay - she knows the sound for M. Good for now. "That says UH," I tell her, pointing to the U. "What word do we have?" "Mooooo!!" she says with excitement! "It's a cow, a cow!" Cookies are now gone and Isadora is talking about something completely unrelated to what we just did, her mouth jammed with cookies.
What I find hopeful in all of that is that Isadora took one of the sounds - the M - and suggested that the word was Moo, a word that begins with M. Nice start! Now we just need to get some alphabet soup!