Customer Rating:  
Summary: My 2 year old loves this puzzle!
Comment: My 2 year old loves this puzzle. The puzzle is big, but she loves to see the train grow across the room. It's very durable, and she has learned both animals and her letters and can do the puzzle now by herself at 2.5.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Sturdy, Fun ABC Puzzle
Comment: This is a great puzzle for many reasons. First for parents this is a sturdy puzzle. We are in a puzzle phase right now and this puzzle is not showing any signs of wear. Second, the pictures are great. Some of the ABC animals are not ones that you normally find in the ABC books. Plus it is a train and with a boy, trains are always great.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent for letter recognition (the ABC song is not just a song)
Comment: This puzzle is a great beginning puzzle for a young pre-schooler. We bought this puzzle for our 3 year old. It is challenging for her as well as entertaining. I rated this puzzle 5 stars, but if 4.75 stars were an option, that would be a more accurate rating. It is not flawless - the main problem is that Melissa and Doug illustrated "X" with a fox, which obviously does not start with X. Admittedly, there aren't many animals that start with X. In fact, I can only think of xenops, and this is thanks to an ABC book my daughter had when she was younger. Further, every piece except for U is an animal - U is illustrated with an umbrella. This seems inconsistent. Unicorn would have been a better option.
Aside from these relatively minor flaws, this puzzle is fantastic. There are 28 pieces. Two pieces form the locomotive and the other 26 pieces correspond to a train car illustrated with a letter in upper and lower case and an animal (except for the aforementioned umbrella) that starts with that letter (except for the fox for x). The puzzle is 10 feet long, so you need a big space to put it together. My daughter loves how long it is. And I love that it is one long puzzle because this forces my daughter to think about the alphabet song, identify the letter that comes next, search for and find the letter she identified and then fit that letter into the puzzle. Before she got this puzzle, I *thought* she knew her letters and the alphabet. However, I realized that she didn't really think about each letter she sang in the song as corresponding to a with a letter in the written form. Similarly, while she could identify a letter as written when we showed it to her, she found it challenging to think about alphabetical order and hunt for the correct letter - she had to picture the letter in her mind in order to locate the letter. Thus, this puzzle was highly educational for her. When we first got the puzzle, each time we sat with her and sang the ABC song with her as we pointed to the letters. When we got to the last letter she had fitted into the puzzle, we would pause and ask what comes next. Once she identified that letter, she would search to it and we'd repeat our previous procedure, singing the alphabet song and identifying the next letter.
The pieces are very good quality and I can tell that they will last a long time. They fit well together but are not too loose. The peices are nice, chunky and thick. As I mentioned above, the puzzle is very long, so my daughter must sit on the floor and sift through the pieces to find the correct letter. This makes assembly of this puzzle particularly fun and interactive.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Too Long
Comment: I purchased this thinking it was the other alphabet floor puzzle with the good review, but this one is ten feet long and connects one to one. I purchased it to help my toddler learn the alphabet, but it just takes up too much floor space and it the pictures are not very fun so the alphabet part of it seems to not to come across well enough. Quality is good if your looking for this type of puzzle.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beware-X is not for fox!
Comment: We recieved this as a present and my son was very excited to put it together. The pictures are nice and the big size makes it fun. As with any alphabet activities, we enjoyed practicing our letters by saying, "C is for Cow," etc. But when we got to X we were shocked to see they put a fox. The age range for the puzzle will expect the traditional "X is for..." set up and not be looking for the letter in the final position. They did U is for umbrella so why they felt they had to do fox for x is unclear. We love most Melissa & Doug items, but fell that this one missed on this. We have to keep correcting our little one that X is not for fox!
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