Why Silly Works

Silly on purpose

An alligator eating an apple is ordinary. An Alligator Apple is hard to forget. Marvy Mashup ABCs is silly on purpose.

The ideas behind it are backed by research that early learning experts agree on. No study has tested our book itself, but here's what the research says.

A young boy sitting on the floor, laughing while reading Marvy Mashup ABCs: Food Animals
Alligator Apple

Learning letters matters

Knowing letter names and sounds is one of the strongest early predictors of later reading. A national panel of reading experts named it one of six early skills most closely linked to later reading and writing.1

Cat Cupcake

Play is how kids learn

A review of 39 studies of children aged 3 to 8 found that playful learning, with a grown-up guiding along, worked as well as or better than direct teaching.2 That's why Marvy Mashups is made to be read together.

Turtle Taco

Laughter helps things stick

People remember funny things because humor grabs their attention.3 Even toddlers can tell the difference between a joke and a mistake, and they love "wrong on purpose."4 A turtle that's also a taco? Exactly.

Elephant Egg

Two words, one letter

Alligator Apple. Elephant Egg. Turtle Taco. Hearing words that start with the same sound helps children notice the sounds letters make, an early step toward reading.5 And when the sounds don't match, like Orange Owl, it's a chance to show that one letter can make more than one sound.

How to read it together

Young kids look at the pictures, not the print.6 So help them find the letter:

1
Point to the big letter.
2
Say its sound: "Ah, ah, A!"
3
Say the mashup together: "Alligator Apple!"
4
Laugh. That's part of it.

Sources

  1. Lonigan & Shanahan, Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel (2008). Summary
  2. Skene et al., "Can guidance during play enhance children's learning and development in educational contexts?" Child Development (2022). Summary
  3. Schmidt, "Effects of humor on sentence memory," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (1994). Link
  4. Hoicka & Gattis, "Do the wrong thing: How toddlers tell a joke from a mistake," Cognitive Development (2008). Link
  5. Bradley & Bryant, "Categorizing sounds and learning to read: A causal connection," Nature (1983). Summary
  6. Evans & Saint-Aubin, "What children are looking at during shared storybook reading," Psychological Science (2005). Link