Choosing the Right Letters: How We Built the Perfect Alphabet for ABCTalkWithMe
When we decided to teach kids words and letters through play, we faced a very unexpected challenge.
It’s easy to say “let’s make words,” but here’s the thing — a child won’t build the word “bus” unless they have exactly the right letters. To make the experience fun and not frustrating, we needed to offer short, simple words that kids could actually create.
But that raised even more questions. How many cubes should we give them? What is the right number to make sure they can build enough words but not get overwhelmed? This was a tough puzzle to solve.
After a lot of thinking and testing, we agreed that the minimum set should include only 9 cubes. Why 9? Because with six sides on each cube, that gives us 36 spaces for letters — enough to cover the entire English alphabet (with a few repeats where needed).
The real challenge, though, was picking the words.
We needed them to be short, familiar, and with as few repeating letters as possible. So, we built a frequency dictionary of short three- and four-letter words. We filtered them, removing rare or confusing ones, and then created a special program to test which words fit best.
This process took us about a week. We reviewed, tested, and discarded many words that didn’t feel right. In the end, we found the perfect ones — words like “cat” and “bass”. These words worked perfectly for our games. They started with clear first letters (great for learning the alphabet) and were easy to assemble from our limited set of cubes.
There was another reason why this was so important. Searching through cubes is much harder than flipping cards. Kids need to physically turn and explore each cube, so giving them too many at once would make the game exhausting. We had to keep things simple and fun.
Once the words were selected, our next challenge began — figuring out how to distribute the letters across different cube sets: 9 cubes, 24 cubes, and 36 cubes. That’s a story for another day, but one thing is clear — this careful planning is what makes ABCTalkWithMe so special and enjoyable for kids.
