Nerf Laser Ops Pro Alphapoint Review (age 8+) for Hasbro

We love Nerf and their latest release is the Laser Ops Pro range. Brand new laser battling blasters which bring Nerf, Laser Tag and augmented reality together in a brand new and very different type of battle to any other Nerf we've ever played with... and it's really rather fun.

In the box are 2 x Nerf Laser Ops Pro blasters and 2 x rubbery armbands to hold smartphones - which are optional. You will need 8 x AA batteries - 4 for each blaster. The packaging is great. Plastic-free and you have storage for your set afterwards to keep it all safe.

Sphero Mini - the awesome App-Enabled Robotic Ball review

I'd seen Sphero Mini before, so I jumped at the opportunity to review. Sphero Mini App Enabled Robotic Ball is an amazing little table-tennis sized ball which is actually a very nippy little robot. You charge it, then control it and programme it, play games and guide it through obstacle courses or just drive around your table or room. It is tons of fun and we think it's awesome!

Sphero Mini is presented in a really smart plastic box which is great for storage and safekeeping afterwards. Inside you have your Sphero ball, USB charging cable, paper guide and a selection of gorgeous, brightly coloured obstacles. The Sphero Mini comes in a selection of 5 different, bright colours - great for knowing which is which if you have more than one!

Crater Craft Farming And Building Game App. Review

Crater Craft is a new free game app from 55pixels and it's set in an imaginary world where teams of robot creatures, or crafters, use resources to create useful or decorative objects, furniture and even buildings. Regular readers will know I'm a big fan of games, but I can rarely justify the time, so I was more than happy to take this job. As it turns out, you can dip into Crater Craft for 5 minutes if that's all you have spare, you never have to commit any period of time, which for me is ideal.

In Crater Craft you manage a crater, running the farm and building a little community with your team of crafters and various visitors who call by to stay. Together you work to create buildings and furniture to make the crater and guest houses nice. You have to provide the crafting equipment and resources by farming, digging and trading.

StikBot ZANIMATION Studio Review (age 4+)

StikBots are bendy little characters who have moving arms, legs, torso and head. Their hands and feet are suckers, so they stay where you put them and are ideal for creating stop-motion animation films. Perfect then that they've released their own StikBot ZANIMATION Studio.

The StikBot ZANIMATION Studio is suitable for age 4+ and we've been sent one to review. It promises to make a movie director out of us all and includes everything you'll need barring an actual device - smartphone or tablet. My son is using a 4 year old phone and the app. still worked on his old Android version.

Included in the box are 2 StikBots, a tripod, staging and scenery. We were also sent the Hair Styling Set with a gold StikBot and 9 different hats and hairstyles.

Skylanders Battlecast Game (age 6+) Review

We've been playing Skylanders Battlecast for a little while now. We were properly introduced to it when we were invited down to London as guests of Skylanders to preview the new Imaginators console game which will be out on October 26th.

Battlecast is quite different from other Skylanders games in that it is a free app. game, with supporting booster cards, but gameplay is still very familiar to any Skylanders fans.

Skylanders Battlecast sees you controlling an individual or group of Skylanders, and taking on Kaos and his cohort in turn-based battles. You have strength to attack physically, and cards to attack, defend and change gameplay.

Education Quizzes For School Age Children Website Review

The Education Quizzes website is a huge resource for children throughout their school years. Quizzes are written by teachers and grouped by age range, from age 4 KS1 up to 16 year olds taking their GSCE's, including a section for children who have English as a second language, and some more in-depth topics such as Flags of The World or London.

Choose the age range suitable for your child (KS1, KS2, 11-Plus, KS3 and GCSE), and then from the list of subjects. Within each subject there will be a number of relevant quizzes, there seem to be at least 10 in each, but some subjects such as KS1 Science have around 100 quizzes! All of the core school subjects are covered, and some topics have their own section too, more extensive parts of the National Curriculum such as Times Tables. Quizzes for younger children are mainly image based, whereas older children have less pictures and more text.

Ice Age Collision Course AR Children's Book Review and Giveaway

Books in our house are usually screen-free and mainly read in the bedroom. Occasionally though a book needs to be let loose a little, and the Ice Age Collision Course Augmented Reality Book by Emily Steed (on sale June 2nd) can definitely use more space. By downloading the free app. your phone or tablet can bring the characters from the book to life in your own home....or even outside your own home...

The new Ice Age movie is released in July this year, and it will see our favourite characters (including Manny, Scrat, Sid and Diego) travel a little higher than before - in space. Ice Age Collision Course AR gives us an insight into an some of the scrapes they will be getting themselves into. The first section of the book lets you help Scrat chase his eternal nemesis - the acorn...

Marvel Kids Spiderman Online Free Games Review

Any regular reader knows we're big Super Hero fans here, and we like Marvel a lot. It'll also come as no surprise to find that my kids like playing computer games and apps. Being asked to review the Marvel Kids Spiderman games was hardly a chore for my 7 and 5 year old boys.

There are 8 different games to play and they all start with a comic strip introduction to the story and the challenge ahead. The games are actually very different and compliment each other well. 

Pictopia Disney Edition Family Game Review (age 7+)

Pictopia Disney Edition from Wonderforge is a picture trivia game recommended for age 7+. A board game that works very differently from most we have played, this isn't one for younger children as it has more complicated rules, but it's easy once you start to play and the variation in questions really adds to the gameplay.

A Disney game would not be something I'd have thought to buy before, but we love this. My partner and I have even played it when the kids aren't there. It turns out there really is plenty of Disney to suit everyone.

The super simple Argos Christmas Wishlist app. for children aged 3+

Every year since the oldest was tiny my children have, around this time of year, collected their Argos book of dreams and sat and circled all the things they'd like for Christmas. They do then have to pick out a small selection of those 15 billion items (approx) to write Christmas lists in their own best handwriting, to pass on to Santa.

The choice out there is immense, and buying the wrong character or colour or set is all too easy. This is the modern world, young children are computer literate, and so it really isn't a surprise that this year Argos have released a Christmas Wishlist app. that children as young as 3 can use to create their own wishlist online.

The Smarter Wifi Kettle from Menkind (review).

When I was asked by Menkind if I would like to promote their time-saving gadgets and try a Smarter Wifi Kettle my first question was 'how does that work then?' My second question was 'what happens if the kettle is empty? My partner just went straight for the 'omg yeah'. As it turns out it might just be me who likes this handy gadget the most - because I'm the one gets out of bed to make a brew when we're watching TV in bed at night, and I'm the first one up and about in the morning...

Before you even see the kettle you're reminded of the fact you won't need to stop what you're doing to put it on. I'm not certain it'll save me 2 days a year though - sadly there's always something I can be doing in the kitchen anyway...

It's a gorgeous looking kettle, with a lovely brushed body and fantastic polished control buttons - just in case you want to use it like a regular kettle and switch it on with your index finger.

Club Penguin Review

Club Penguin isn't a new thing to me, our teenagers played it when they were younger. They all had accounts and played together and individually, we even bought Club Penguin soft penguins for 2 of them to take to bed. Now it's the turn of my younger ones to have a look.

Club Penguin is an online game world aimed at children aged around 6-14. Anyone can set up a free account which gives access to most things, but for all the little extras you can subscribe from £2.50 per month.

You can dive straight in, or take a look at the video to find out what it's about - my boys wanted to get started. 

20 Years Of Dinosaur Roar! New Book, App., Website, Competition and Printables!

Dinosaur Roar! by Paul and Henrietta Stickland is an absolute classic of a book for young children. First published in 1994, it celebrates it's 20th birthday this year and loads of fantastic goodies have been released including an app. and a whole new Dinosaur Roar! website.

A special 20th Anniversary edition of Dinosaur Roar! has been released in a really great size. It allows children to see all of the detail in the illustrations, but isn't ridiculously heavy or large.

My oldest child was born in 1994, and Dinosaur Roar! is a book that's been in our collection in various forms since he was small. The illustrations are gorgeous, the dinosaurs have amazing character and depth, and the text introduces all kinds of useful concepts and new words to a younger child.

As your child grows and starts to learn to read, Dinosaur Roar! offers a brilliant opportunity to practice familiar sounds and words. The minimal text isn't intimidating to a child of any age and most of the words are easily worked out phonetically.

The text is written in a lovely rhyme that leads you through the book, but keeps gentle pace and allows for lots of great voices!

Dinosaur Roar! is a great setting off point for your child's imagination and inquisitiveness, and a brilliant stepping stone to non-fiction books. It always leads to questions, however many times we've read it.

A new Dinosaur Roar website has been built with up to date news, games and puzzles and even a Dinosaur Roar! Club you can join. 

A brand new app.  for children aged 2-4 (ish) has been created.

The app. has 3 sections ~ Read, Colour and Name.

Read is (as you'd expect) the book itself and has 3 different options. Read To Me is the book read by children and it's very lovely. There's lots of expression and it's very clearly spoken. It's also incredibly easy to navigate through the e-book. Read Aloud is without the audio of the children reading, and Record allows you to record yourself reading along with the illustrations and text.

Colour has all of the dinosaurs from the book for your child to colour in. they can choose their own colour scheme, or select to fill in with the colours from the book. It's really simple and you can't 'go over the lines', so it's not frustrating for a little one, but they can still play about with the colours and easily give their dinosaur blue legs and a stripey tummy with a dotty head if they wish.

Name is a Dinosaur-name generator. Type in your own name and shake the iPad, and you will be given a Dinosaur name. My boys loved this, they thought it was hilarious!

I was a little disappointed as this is designed for younger children aged 2-4 and the keyboard is in capitals. Although my 5 year old was okay with that, my 4 year old didn't know that E is e and stubbornly spent ages trying to spell his name. I easily found I could change the on screen text to lower case, but couldn't find an option to change the keyboard - which even confused my 5 year old!

The app. is fairly simple, but it's only priced at £1.99, so I think that's very fair, and a percentage of the royalties from sales go to support the work of the Natural History Museum. It's currently only available on IOS, so available from the Apple store here.

To celebrate the launch of the app. the people behind Dinosaur Roar! are looking for the nation's fiercest roar!  

Record a short video of your child letting out a ferocious dinosaur roar and you could win a prize including an iPad Mini, Dinosaur Roar! goodies and a chance to feature on the app. 

Videos need to be shared via the Dinosaur Roar Facebook page, via Twitter to @Dinosaurroar or by email to roar@dinosaurroar.com (t's and c's on the Facebook page)

If you want to become as good at drawing as Paul Stickland, you'll need to practice. On his website Paul has free printable colouring sheets and pages from Dinosaur Roar! and Ten Terrible Dinosaurs, and he teamed up with The Guardian Newspaper to create a step-by-step guide to drawing Dinosaur Roar! which you can find here.

Dinosaur Roar! is published by Penguin and Random House and is available in paperback £6.99 and hardback £12.99.

I was sent a free app. code and a new hardback copy of Dinosaur Roar! 20th Anniversary Edition in order to review for this post.

Half Term Holiday Activities To Keep Children's Brains Active

I think younger children who attend school and nursery really benefit from being encouraged to carry on reading and writing during the holidays because they're at the age where a week off is a very long time and can put them a step back.

We've 4 boys, and we've 3 girls - when they were younger the girls would happily colour and write and draw, whereas the boys think of the whole thing as 'work' and none of them, however different they are, have ever really taken joy from sitting for long with workbooks. It's always a challenge to find things that they're happy to do to keep them on track through the holidays, so here are a few of my ideas.

Printables

Holiday Cottages have a 3 free printable games that you can use to keep the kids entertained whether at home or out and about - Roadside Bingo, a Countryside Treasure Hunt and a Beach Treasure Hunt. You can download them here.

Tiny Me, the people who made our lovely wall stickers, have a great range of free printable activities for any occasion, and can certainly give your children a few hours entertainment making masks and door hangers and all kinds of things. Their printables can be found here. 

Games and Puzzles

Spending time playing games with your children is an excellent way to bond and make memories as well as reinforce learning about numbers and counting, turn-taking, being a good loser and honing fine motor skills. I very well remember playing Monopoly with my Father when he was off work and hopefully my children will remember playing games with me. 

Some of our most favourite games for younger children are Orchard Toys games, with Round And Round (age 3+) and Counting Caterpillars (age 3+) being great examples. For older children we like Drumond Parks Wordsearch Junior (4+) and The Magic Tooth Fairy Game (5+).

Reading Books Together

There is no better way to get a child interested in reading than to read with them and it doesn't have to be a purely bedtime activity. When your children are driving you bats, fighting or tearing about the house like madmen, 10 minutes quiet reading time can make all the difference. We love the Early Readers from Orion Books because it really is a team effort to read along with my 5 year old, with my 3 year old watching, listening and learning.

Cooking And Baking

All children love baking with adults, and it can be a super simple no bake like our Rocky Road, or something more complex like making their own pizzas for tea. Of course cookies and cakes are always popular too. It's fantastic for learning about all kinds of things - nutrition, science, weights and measurements, colour mixing, different cultures and even history. There are loads of excellent ideas on the Pinterest UK Official Cooking With Kids board.

Museums And Libraries 

 Libraries and most museums are free to visit and they're absolutely crammed full of interesting stuff to stimulate children and adults. They go to huge effort to lay on extra activities during the school holidays. We recently visited the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, who have a week of activities around Spies, Disguise and Ways To Hide - with a special focus on animals role in war time.

Screen Time

Screen time doesn't have to be mindlessly beating up aliens or racing round a track, it can be a fantastic tool for learning and keeping your brain working, and it's a brilliant reward or a break for a child who has been a star.

Heroes Of The City

Books that have accompanying apps. like Heroes Of The City (age 2+) or Robotslayer (age 5+) encourage reading and puzzle solving. Heroes Of The City has free levels and films to watch and The Robotslayer app. is totally free for half term week on IOS - you can download it here.

Online educational products are fun as well as teaching tools and your child will be learning without even realising as they play games and solve puzzles. We're particularly fond of Reading Eggs and there is a code for a free 4 week trial on my review page.

Lego

Build something together. Start a project. Stretch your own and your child's imagination. Build on fine motor skills and design ideas, problem-solving and logic skills. Create something you can be proud of. Playing isn't just for kids, adults need a break too....

Enjoy your break, and enjoy spending quality time with your children....

I was not paid to promote any of these things, I do so because I feel they have value. I did not accept payment for reviews or links, although I may have previously received an item or experience free for review.

Colour blindness for the Uninitiated

My 5 year old has an eye test at school today, so at some point I'll get a call from the school nurse to tell me that he's colour blind. I already know, I spotted it when he was very young because I've been here before. My 16 year old son is also colour blind (colour vision deficient).

I have always been around colour blind people. My brother, Grandfather and other male relatives were colour blind. My ex (of 15 years) is also colour blind, and my partner's father. This post hopes to answer some of your questions regarding the most common type of colour deficiency - Red-Green Colour Blindness. An inability to fully see red or green.

Heroes Of The City review and giveaway

Heroes Of The City is a new children's programme that's creating quite a stir. Created in Sweden, it features a group of 3D-animated vehicles who travel around doing heroic deeds and rescuing the everyday folk who live in their town.

There are an array of products to support the DVD series, including die cast vehicles, books and a Movie app. and we were sent a selection to have a look at, including Heroes Of The City DVD Volume 1.

The DVD contains 5 episodes and they're all nice stories about being helpful and sensible. The characters are familiar looking and friendly and will appeal to younger children. My 3 year old especially enjoyed this.

The cars are metal die cast on a plastic chassis and my son loves the fact that he can look for them in the book and see them on the DVD.

The book is A4 size and excellent quality. The story is easy to follow, with some unfamiliar new words and ways of saying things, which I always think is a great thing. A child's vocabulary doesn't have to be 'babyish'.

We were also given free access to test out the Movie app. The app. has a free selection of a game, a movie and a music video, so you can try before you buy, and then the additional games and content are bought individually, so you don't have to pay for parts that your child won't use, but I think in total if you bought everything it only adds up to around £10.

All together the app. includes 9 games (a jigsaw, matching game, firefighting game and loads of others) and features over 6 hours of movies - enough to keep any child occupied! It is best suited for children aged around 2-6 as it deals with very basic play and would lack challenge for an older child.

My son is nearly 4 and during a very long and tedious hospital visit last week we were able to really try it out.  We didn't go online when we were in the hospital, so we focussed on the games. My son really enjoyed them, he found a lot of reward from completing the challenges and moving up the levels. He tried most of the games and he actually enjoyed the matching game most of all.

The Heroes Of  The City Movie app. is available to download on IOS from the Appstore or on Android from GooglePlay.