The past week I have been mostly preoccupied with finding Esther and William the right preschool.

I think as a teacher and a mummy it makes choosing an educational setting really hard as you know what you would do if you had a group of small children in your care all day.

You would want them to have fun and to play but you would also want them to learn.

Esther and William are learning all the time. Their capacity for new things amazes me. They literally learning something new everyday.

Things we are working on at the moment are colours, numbers and letters.

They are confident with their colours now with their current favourites being purple and black.

At only just two years old Esther and William can confidently recite numbers to 10, are beginning to understand counting and can definitely count up to 3 objects, possibly 4.

If you tell Esther and William a letter sound they will tell you a word beginning with that sound. They also kind of know the order of letters in the alphabet.

Most of this knowledge has come from one man. AJ Jenkins. We watch his videos on You Tube and listen to his CDs in the car and we all think he is rather amazing.

I wish I had known about him when I was teaching as my Year 2 class would have loved his stuff and it woud have really helped with their learning.

Here are some of our favourites

The Animal Sounds Song is the first AJ Jenkins song that we discovered. We used to watch it every day before tea to practise signing animals when we were first learning BSL. Esther and William loved listening to the song and showing off their signs.

The Shape Song was our next discovery and introduced Esther and William to simple shapes though they were more excited about spotting the car at the end of this video.

AJ Jenkins writes and performs a range of phonics and alphabet songs. What we love about them is his correcty pronunciation of the letter sounds and that he uses the same objects to represent each letter through all of his songs. This consistency has really helped Esther and William to learn the words to the songs and so begin to become familiar with the alphabet, letter sounds and at least one word that begins with each sound.

This is a great video for learning to recognise and recite numbers to 10.

And Where’s The Monkey has helped Esther and William to learn positional language. Prepositions of Place. It also just makes them laugh which is so important too.

The CD we now have in the car features this great song about things you might see in the garden.

The man I think is a genius. He has made early learning almost rock star cool. He has a lovely voice that is nice to listen to. We have his music on the car when we want to enjoy some calm time, just as we watch his videos when we are settling down for tea.

I think music is a great aid for learning and obviously AJ Jenkins agrees with me. If you have babies or young children you should really check him out.

Here at Edspire we are huge fans!