The English language is quickly becoming a forgotten art. As a college student who has taken English courses and had to look at the work of other peers, it is quite depressing to see how many can’t deal with basic spelling. The rise of Internet and texting lingo is negating the need for spelling correctly, or at all, as a whole sentence can be downgraded to “k”.

If you want to try and curb this horrific fate for mankind, then try giving your children devices like the Handheld Talking Spelling Bee at a young age. Hopefully it will help them to learn the difference between “their” and “they’re” before they hit high school. This device has a 2 1/2” color touchscreen, and the players will be given a word in a sentence, hear it defined, and then repeated by a human voice. There are over 12,000 words in this $70 toy, and many of them draw from the Merriam-Webster and New Oxford dictionaries. Three levels of difficulty will help your child broaden their word-base so that they can hopefully keeps their noggins ahead of the game with knowing how to read and write the language they speak.