Learn with Neddy Teddy and his Phonic Friends by Gill Davies and Barry Green (Top That! Publishing)

As Charlotte begins her reading journey, we feel like we're caught up in a phonic whirlwind. Anything that can help her make phonic exercises more fun and more colourful is a definite bonus.

"Learn with Neddy Teddy and his Phonic Friends" is a neat idea. Each colourful panel has a "Phonics Wheel" that children can use in conjunction with the text and fabulous illustrations to match phonic sounds, trickier letter combinations and word matching.

As you can see from the panel, the animal characters and super-colourful pictures are imaginative and fun, and the phonics wheel is a stroke of genius - though some parents might find that they need to cover over the 'picture' window to ensure children are sounding out and learning properly, rather than just guessing words or letters by looking directly at the images.

The wheel idea ensures that the solid and beautifully presented book has an absolute ton of content to ensure that children don't get too bored with the exercises, and can carry on using the book as their phonics skills develop.

At the moment, it's really great to see Charlotte taking those first few learning and reading steps along with her school and with our help, and it's massively rewarding to see her take to something like the Neddy Teddy books with gusto.

Charlotte's best bit: She absolutely loves the animal characters, and of course rotating the wheel to try out all the different word and letter combinations

Daddy's favourite bit: A really solid book and the letter wheel idea is a stroke of genius - May need some parental intervention to turn the wheel at times (but this is very common with this type of book, sometimes they need a bit of 'working in' to make them easier for small fingers to turn without hurting themselves)

(Kindly supplied to us for review by the lovely folk at Top That! Publishing)