No, this is not a photograph of our daughter writing her ABCs flawlessly on the cover of Wipe Clean Letters. It's the cover itself, which features a hand model demonstrating what the book is designed for: teaching your child how to write letters using the dotted lines you remember from penmanship class along with colorful pictures and blocky, sans-serif letters surrounding the tracing lines. We love the idea behind this dry-erase book, which does wipe off easily over the surface of the entire book, even the cover. If your toddler spends enough time with this book, the spine will gradually get pockmarked with black dots as your child's quivering pen-hand wanders off the pages, but otherwise you'll be able to hand it down to the grandkids.

The best way to start using this book is to show your child once what the book is intended for by tracing a single letter and congratulating yourself on following the tracing line. Then step away and leave them alone. Chances are, you'll see a lot of this:

But that's the beauty of a dry-erase book - there's really no such thing as starting too early, unless your child is so young that you're afraid you'll confuse them by the prospect of being able to write in one book but not others. Z seems to have grasped this pretty well; she owns a used book that has been colored in, and since she was not the guilty party, she considers it part affront and part intriguing sociological fact that "a tiny baby" would be so confused about the world as to do such a thing.

The other reason to keep this book from your conscience-free toddler is that dry-erase markers don't erase off of, say, couches.

This is what you get, eventually, when you're not looking - in our case, Z never even announced the feat, but thought of it on par with the many other "drawings" she made in the book over the course of a busy dry-erase session. It was only flipping through the book ourselves that we found it, and of course we made a big deal of it when we did. But she just went back to circling things and drawing lines connecting entirely unrelated objects and generally marring the surface of her book.

The way we see it, all drawing is deep learning, and we are now proudly displaying drawings Z makes of various people in her life, each portrait a bloblike form with exactly two arms, two or three legs, and two vacant, oval eyes. We couldn't be more proud.

We are much less impressed with the apparent goals of the other books in the Wipe Clean series. One of the great things about Wipe Clean Letters is that every letter has one instance, like the one Z chanced to write on above, backed by the same letter in a heavy Futura font. The effect of this is to allow children to widely miss the tracing line and still get a sense that they have completed the task. Their goal is defined within a range of possibilities, rather than as a "perfect" act. With the exception of a book about numbers, other books in the series have kids tracing the outlines of photorealistic objects, which is doomed to failure until the child is just old enough that it becomes pointless.

For non-letter tracing we much prefer Kumon's First Book of Tracing, which redefines the activity in a way that will please children and enlighten parents. Designed as a series of challenges for two- to four-year-olds - many of them so simple you really need to see your child try them before you realize how challenging they can be - Kumon's tracing activities do not involve much "tracing" of objects at all, but rather attempts to lead creatures along paths among or between objects. The paths get narrower and more complex as children progress through the book. We'd love to see Kumon come out with a wipe-clean version of this book, but until they do, you can modify your own, as Thingamababy points out; just cut the pages from the book, trim them down a bit, and slip them into sheet-protecting sleeves. Make sure to buy low-odor dry-erase markers, but don't worry about an eraser - a tissue or an old sock will do the trick just fine.