Children learn letter shapes with their hands well before they learn them with a pencil, and this book is built entirely around that fact. Each letter is grooved into the thick board, so a fingertip runs the shape the same way a pen eventually will. The muscle memory arrives first and the writing follows.

An amazing anteater. A cool cat in a car. An enormous elephant. Every page pairs a letter with an image and a phrase that makes its sound impossible to miss, so a child is picking up phonics and letter formation in the same pass without either being announced as a lesson.

It is lower case throughout, which is the deliberate and correct choice: lower case is what a child will actually meet on the page and be asked to write at school, and starting with capitals means unlearning something later. Sixteen board pages, built for the treatment a two year old considers normal.