Sensory Play: Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom

Kinetic Sand has been incredibly popular for several years now. It’s one of those things you can’t help touching and playing with if there’s an open box nearby. It’s incredibly tactile, which makes it perfect for sensory play; and if you drop it on the floor it is easily swept or vacuumed up, it’s no mess sensory fun!

Kinetic Sand is made from 98% sand and 2% silica oil. It behaves a bit like playdough but without the sticky horror if it gets walked into your carpet. You can clump the sand up together like a ball, then watch as it melts through your hands almost like a liquid. It’s strange, but in a good way.

The Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom is a brilliant set for anyone who wants to bring the beach into their own home. It comes in its own beachy box, but it would work equally well in a high sided plastic box, like I used for our sensory play activities. The set comes with 3lbs of kinetic sand and 6 castle-themed moulds to create walls, bridges, towers and more. There are also 2 multi-use tools which can be used to cut, dig, rake and shovel the sand.

The beauty of the Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom coming in its own play box, is that once you’ve finished playing with it, it’s all easily packed away back in the box for next time. You build sandcastles and other structures, which stay in position for a while, then eventually melt away into a heap of sand.

Sensory Play: Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom

Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom is great for sensory play, you can use it to fuel your imagination too. I especially like the set because for me, sand is always about the beach. We’ve enjoyed playing with various Kinetic Sand sets over the years; but the simple joy of doing what you would do on the beach, but in miniature, and at the kitchen table is so much more fun.

Kinetic sand isn’t just great fun to play with, it also has a number of sensory benefits.

It can help to develop and hone fine motor skills, which in turn can help with writing and drawing.
It can encourage creativity, imaginative, creative play which in turn can help speech and language development.
Focusing on a task, such as creating a sandcastle can help increase attention spans. It gives something to focus on and can encourage calm play.

The Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom costs £19.99 and it’s available from a wide range of retailers and online. It’s suitable for ages 3+ and if you’re wanting to create a miniature beach at home, this is just the thing.

Sensory Play: Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom

If you would like to read other reviews of Kinetic Sand products, you can find some here:

We were sent Kinetic Sand Beach Sand Kingdom for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Review: Orchard Toys What a Performance Game

This week we’ve been playing a new board game from Orchard Toys – What a Performance! It’s kind of like charades, but with a lot more going on. We properly laughed when we played this game and it would be a great game for small-ish groups of people or families.

Review: Orchard Toys What a Performance Game

What a Performance is great to get the whole family laughing and playing together. Race your way around the performance board to be the first player or team to reach the finish. Along the way you’ll have to act out a scene, make lots of fun noises, do funny actions and activities along the way. Can you pretend to be a monkey, make a noise like a firework or wiggle your ears? If you can’t, use the magic decoder and reveal your hidden forfeit on the back of the cards!

There are over 300 fun challenges to perform, so there’s never a dull moment.

Review: Orchard Toys What a Performance Game

The box contains a jigsaw game board, 100 activity cards, a spinner, a sand timer; a card holder, a performance star, four character stands; four playing pieces, a magic decoder, a dice and an instruction leaflet.

The game is fairly simple to set up. You put the jigsaw board together, this comes in four pieces and takes seconds to do. You choose which colour you will be, red, green, yellow or blue and take your playing pieces and put them at the start.

The youngest player starts by rolling the dice and moving along the board accordingly. When you land on a square Say/Act/Do you take a card and read the corresponding instruction. If the instructions has “Guess” written on it, the other players have to set the timer and guess what you’re doing within the time. There are other squares, Spin means you spin the spinner which will choose your challenge. Landing on the ? square means you take a card and using the magic decoder, you follow the hidden instructions on the back of the card.

Review: Orchard Toys What a Performance Game

It’s all very simple and really lots of fun. The game had us doing monkey and dinosaur impressions, sit ups, touching our toes, it had us wiggling our ears and talking in silly voices. It was tremendous fun and just the kind of thing to bring out the silly in anyone.

As with all Orchard Toys games, What a Performance does have some educational benefits. It promotes imaginative play, encourages personal and social skills and can encourage group play. I think one of the biggest things we noticed with it, was it was really great for getting him to think about how to follow the instructions. This gave him more confidence to stand up and be silly, which is an essential life skill, or it is in my book.

What a Performance is a properly fun game. It’s just the thing for building a bit of confidence whilst having a whole lot of fun!

What a Performance is suitable for ages 5 to adult and for 2 or more players. It costs £16.50 and is widely available.

Review: Orchard Toys What a Performance Game

Disclosure: We were sent the What a Performance game for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Toy Review: Kinetic Rock 3-in-1 Loader Set

Kinetic sand has been incredibly popular for a few years now. It’s great stuff, kinetic sand is 98% sand and 2% silica oil and behaves a bit like playdough but without the sticky horror if it gets walked into your carpet. We play with our box of kinetic sand regularly, it’s really tactile and great for building and moulding. But what about the newly released kinetic rock? We got our hands on the new Kinetic Rock 3-in-1 Loader set to see what it was like.

Kinetic Sand is the leading sand brand in the UK. It’s a perennial favourite and kids and adults love the feel and texture of the magical mouldable sand and rock. You just can’t stop playing with it!

The Kinetic Rock 3-in-1 Loader set is suitable for children aged 3+. When I gave it my 7 year old he went completely nuts for it. The set comes with a loader with three changeable attachments (a bucket loader, a jackhammer and a drill), it also comes with a poseable construction figure and shovel, pick, wrench, lunchbox and a bag of the gold kinetic rock too.

The set itself is great, really well thought out with lots of tools included. The way you can change the attachments by clipping them on and off the front of the loader is very clever and really simple for children to do. The construction figure is about the same size as a Lego minifigure and slots together easily.

Kinetic rock and kinetic sand are great for hands-on, imaginative play. My son has played with it very happily every day since we opened the box. He creates all kinds on construction scenarios and plays them out. He’s got a lot of construction toys, so sometimes extra diggers come along and join in the fun!

The kinetic rock is made from natural rock and it somehow, magically stick together. It’s really tactile and mouldable, so great for this construction site. We use a plastic tray with a deep lip to keep everything together, it helps to stop accidental rock spillages. Though even though the rocks will stick together, they won’t stick to your carpets, you can pick them up or vacuum them if you need to.

If I were to criticise anything, the bag of kinetic rock included is a little on the small side. If I were buying this again I would buy an extra bag of the kinetic rock to go with it, especially if more than one child will be playing with the set.

The Kinetic Rock 3-in-1 Loader is a great play set with the potential for lots of creative, imaginative play. My son really enjoys playing with the set and I actually prefer it to the kinetic sand, I think I prefer the slight chunkiness of the rocks. The small boy thinks it’s brilliant!

The Kinetic Rock 3-in-1 Loader Set costs £16.99 and is available at all good retailers nationwide. For more information, visit their website.

Disclosure: We were sent this kinetic rock set for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Review: Bladez Toyz Remote Control Inflatable R2-D2

We never knew we needed a Remote Control Inflatable R2-D2 until we got one. Bladez Toyz make a whole range of different inflatable characters, but we chose the classic R2-D2. Who doesn’t need a Remote Control Inflatable R2-D2 in their lives?

Our inflatable R2-D2 stands at 42cm (16.5 inches) tall and comes with an easy to use handset and real droid sound effects. He does need inflating which you can do by blowing him up with your mouth or a balloon pump. It only take a few minutes to blow him up. He also needs 6 AA batteries.

When you open the box you’ll find an inflatable R2-D2 with a drive unit, a radio remote control unit, a PVC repair patch and some instructions. You’ll need 4 AA batteries in R2-D2 and the other 2 AA batteries go into the remote control unit. You can use his inside or outside, but you probably should keep him indoors.

R2-D2 is really easy to put together and set up. If you’ve got batteries to hand you can probably be up and running in under 10 minutes from opening the box. The 2.4GHz Radio Control allows you to drive forwards and spin and has a range of 30 metres.

When R2-D2 moves he plays various sound effects, chattering, beeping and occasionally screaming as he wheels around. The sound effects are what really made this Remote Control Inflatable R2-D2 for me. He’s hilarious and has to be seen to really get how funny he is.

The Remote Control Inflatable R2-D2 from Bladez Toyz is suitable for children aged 3+ (and adults, who if they are like me will find this hilarious). This Remote Control Inflatable R2-D2 costs £24.99

The Bladez Toyz range of Star Wars inflatables is available from a number of retailers including Maplin.

We were sent this Inflatable R2-D2 for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Review: Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game

My son is six now and does seem to enjoy doing maths at school and at home. I’m keen to encourage this, especially as I was always terrible at maths myself. I’m a great believer in making learning fun, so when we were sent the Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game I thought he would like it, and I was right!

Review: Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game

The Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game is for ages 5-7 and helps to teach and reinforce addition, subtraction and multiplication. Designed for 2-4 players this is a game my son really, really loves and makes us play every night after dinner.

The game play is really easy to get your head around. Each player chooses one of the four wizard boards, you spread the magic sum cards face down and star up on the table. You also have a selection of spell ingredient cards, deal each player six of these cards, these have a number on one side and a gruesome spell ingredient on the other.

Review: Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game

To play you turn over a magic sum card and do the sum on the card eg 5+2= if you have the number 7 on any of your spell ingredient cards, shout abracadabra and put your gruesome spell ingredient onto your wizard board. If you need to check your answer is correct, rub the star on the back of the magic sum card and this will magically reveal the answer.

Review: Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game

If there’s no match or you answer the sum incorrectly then the other players have a chance to win that card if they get the sum right and have a spell ingredient card to match. The winner is the first layer to fill their wizard board with all six spell ingredients. It’s actually much easier than it sounds.

The horrible spell ingredients include worm-infested cupcakes, brains and bogies. For my son the eye of newt and wing of bat element is something he particularly enjoys.

The game has been designed specifically for KS1 maths in collaboration with teachers and educational professionals. It incorporates a broad range of sums including addition, subtraction and multiplication to offer a challenging game.

The Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game helps to develop the following areas of learning –

Develops Number and Counting Skills
Supports first multiplication, addition and subtraction
Encourages Observational Skills
Develops Personal and Social Skills

Review: Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game

I know from playing the game with my son that he is very engaged with it, he enjoys creating the spells and the challenge of doing the maths to get enough of the cards to win the game. For my money, this is probably one of the best Orchard Toys games we’ve had and is perfectly pitched for my 6 year old.

If you do get this game, can I offer a small tip. The magic sum cards are in sets for addition, subtraction and multiplication. I know my son is pretty confident with addition and subtraction; so for a while we just played with these cards to bolster his confidence. Over time we have introduced the harder sums, the multiplication cards etc and he has found those easier to do and has approached them with greater confidence.

I didn’t think it was possible, but this game really makes maths fun for us all!

The Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game is available from a wide range of retailers and costs around £12. For more information, visit the Orchard Toys website.

Review: Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game

Note: We were sent the Orchard Toys Magic Maths Game for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Toy Review: Spy Gear Spy Video Walkie Talkies

One of the most fun things about Mummy’s iPad is the Facetime app. The boy loves to Facetime his dad, or his cousin, or anyone really. I remember walking to the phone box at the end of our road to make a phone call, so all of the communication technology available today is almost a thing of wonder to me. Even now there’s something a bit extra special about being able to video chat with someone. The video chat loving boy and I put a set of Spy Gear Spy Video Walkie Talkies to test. What did we think of this latest accessory for junior spies?