Cool Homemade Toys: Spinny Speller

I decided that Theo was finally ready for a Spinny Speller this year for his birthday.  I pinned this ages ago, but was waiting to make it until he was starting to put sounds together when playing with words and letters.  My version of this Spinny Speller is based on a tutorial here.  

I changed mine up a bit, using craft paint rather than crayons, and different letter combinations.  I planned this around the fact that I wanted Theodore to be able to spell out his nickname, but also make as many words as possible.  This limited a lot of the choices I had in what letters to use, but the combination that I picked makes at least 40 words.  A few words that were new to us, but lots of common ones as well.  My husband did offer to write a script to help me in finding these, but I just used a lot of logic, a lot of scrabble dictionaries, and I did indeed list out all 256 options possible with the final letter choices to check all the combinations.  And there's only one that is a mildly offensive word.

You can guess that the math teacher in me will come out again in a few years and use this as we're discussing combinations and permutations.

In case your child has the same name and you'd like to know my letter choices, they are:
First Letter:  B, C, S, T
Second Letter:  E, H, K, R
Third Letter:  A, E, I, O
Fourth Letter:  M, O, P, W

*I wanted a keepsake speller with his name.  If I was doing this just to work on phonics, I would probably just use labels and duplos like these awesome ones here.*