Straight Edge for Growing Minds

Straight Edge, Inc. is an educational supply company who’s mission is to encourage kids to read through innovative products. The Opinionated Parents have been reviewing several of their products over the past weeks and have been very impressed. We’ve had team members as well as friends who are parents, preschool teachers, early elementary teachers, and homeschoolers take a look at the products and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

The Inside-Outside Puzzles are a cool take on the good old puzzle. They’re made of sturdy 1/4? board and at first glance are just a puzzle with an appealing picture. However, printed underneath the puzzle on the tray is a colorful cross section that illustrates and explains how things work with clearly printed captions for early readers. A reviewers 3 year old son loved this puzzle (we tried the dairy barn edition) and didn’t want to give it up so that we could take it to a homeschooling family who are currently exploring farming. When we finally did pry it out of his sad little hands (and replaced it with a toy to thank him for helping us - we’re not that mean!) we were able to share it with a family who have 3, 5 and 7 year old children.

All three of those children enjoyed it. The older kids truly learned something from it and the 3 year old just loved that there was something under the puzzle pieces that she could hide and uncover. Learning is learning, right? Perhaps doing these educational puzzles with your kids will reduce the number of “Why” and “How” questions you are bombarded with all.day.long.

The Story in a Box books are board books each with a built in drawer holding 7 stand-up characters or props related to the story. These were tested in a preschool classroom of 3 & 4 year olds as well as in a kindergarten and a grade one classroom and all age groups thoroughly enjoyed them. The younger children explored the early reading skill or making up a story to go with the pictures and characters and enjoyed, primarily, the dramatic play aspect of using the characters as “actors” to tell the story. The school age children moved toward reading (or, in some case, making up, which is a step in the right direction) the story and using the cardboard characters to act out the plot as it actually happened in the story. With both groups, we asked them to tell “the next chapter” of the story using the characters and the creative play that came out of that was imaginative, intelligent and downright hilarious! These are available in seven classic fairy tales and would be a great purchase for parents and/or teachers of children aged 3-6.

In the Abigail’s Adventures series, each book comes with an Abigail doll that little ones will enjoy. The stories follow 3 1/2 year old Abigail through a series of activities. We reviewed the “Abigail Ice Skates” edition and it was very well received by a reviewers 2 1/2 year old daughter who is actually learning to skate. The book reinforced the lesson her mother had been trying to teach her for the past month ~ if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again…Why is it that toddlers listen to books better than they listen to their parents?

Last, but very far from least, we reviewed the Read a Mat, Write a Mat and Color a Mat series. These are WAY cool. The Write a Mats and Color a Mats are similar to items that I use regularly in my own classroom and they’re always popular with the children. Something about writing on plastic instead of paper always gets them going. The Straight Edge series’ offers WAY more titles than I have ever seen in any store. I especially love the Read a Mats though. They come in over 40 titles that are sure to entice even the most fidgety kid to spend a few minuted actually sitting at the table.

As a teacher I love the idea of toys that disguise learning as fun. Not that learning isn’t fun. It certainly is. But these products are great even for those kids that do need to be tricked into thinking they’re not doing homework!