This is the pack most Pakistani parents remember from their own school bag: a card of bright blocks with A for apple, B for ball, C for cat printed on them. It costs less than a school notebook and it does the one job a nursery-age child actually needs, which is putting a letter, a picture and a word in the same place at the same time.

Fifteen blocks are on the card, running A through O in order: apple, ball, cat, dog, eagle, fan, goat, hen, ice cream, jug, kite, lion, mango, nest and orange. Every face has the capital printed large in black, a line drawing beside it, and the word spelled out underneath in capitals.

The line drawings are the old-fashioned kind — a simple outline of a goat, a hen, a jug — rather than photographs. That works in their favour at this age. A child names an outline faster than a detailed picture, and the same drawing is what they see on classroom charts across the country, so the two reinforce each other.

Because they are loose cubes and not a chart, they are used the way blocks are used: lined up in order along a table edge, stacked into a tower, hidden and hunted for, sorted into the yellow-green pile and the pink pile. A child who will not sit for a flashcard will happily line up fifteen blocks and be corrected on the order.

One honest note. The block for O prints the word as ORENGE rather than ORANGE. It is a printing error on the product and we would rather you knew before ordering than found it at home; every other block reads correctly. Most parents use it as a spotting game once their child is reading.

The pack is sold shrink-wrapped on a printed header card by Khudee Toys & Games. No age is marked on it; we suggest three years and up with an adult nearby, because a single block is small. The Safencia price is Rs. 375 with Cash on Delivery across Pakistan, including Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

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