Holiday 1999
Seal of Approval
Product Testing Report
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Little
Linguist
Neurosmith
Following in the footsteps of the superb Music Blocks,
Neurosmith shows its skill once again as a creative force in the field of
toddler education. This audible
teaching tool is a responsive device that identifies character names and sounds
as your child places them in the main unit.
With lights and exceptional digital audio, your child will be thrilled
with their progress and skill as they play.
The real kicker is that English is just one of the languages they will
learn. The enclosed Spanish
cartridge identifies the character pieces en espaņol while the optional French
and Japanese cartridges will have your child identifying the molded pieces that
range from cat and dog to airplane and elephant. We've always heard that young minds can grasp foreign
languages, with Little Linguist we got to see and hear it for ourselves!
Recommended Age: 1 to 5 Price: $69.95
Learning Circle
Educational
Insights
This carry along toy challenges young children with visual
matching games that are fun to play and a snap to master.
By pressing on buttons that light up in response to your child's touch,
kids can demonstrate to parents, teachers and most importantly to themselves,
their ability to find and identify opposites, colors and many other skills.
Included in the package is a very large set of two sided cards that fit
onto the front for play and store nicely in the rear for storage and travel.
Recommended Age: 3 and up Price: $29.95
Ant
Zone
Educational
Insights
Ant farms have been around for years but their lasting
appeal was never more apparent than during our recent testing period.
Whether it is the ant's great work ethic or the constant activity, ant
farms, which have been a source of fun and curiosity when today's parents were
kids, remain so in 1999. The open air "free range" design of Ant Zone
allows observers to witness the working and living techniques of harvest ants,
the big red ones! The set up of your Zone is quite simple, then as you
introduce your ants (which come by mail in a couple of weeks) to their new home,
you see how ingenious this ant farm design is.
There is room to roam here and the ants do. Not all of our ants made it through the two-month testing
period, but aside from the survival rate, it certainly made for a very
interesting science experiment.
Recommended Age: 6 and up Price: $19.95
Pie
in the Sky Fraction Game
Learning
Resources
Somehow, somewhere, the pie became the dessert of choice
when teaching children about fractions. Not
that we have a problem with that but have you ever wondered, why not cake?
Since that is a moot point, we carry onward as did the folks at Learning
Resources who have created a fraction skill building game that is fun to play
and very effective at teaching the concept of fractions.
The visual reinforcement of the pie, or fraction concept, is helpful and
most parents felt that it would have a lasting helpful effect for their
children.
Recommended Age: 7 and Up Price: $12.95
E-Power
VTech
Industries, LLC
This laptop replica may not have Pentium power but it is
loaded with games, quizzes, a personal planner and even the ability to print out
your work. We've seen plenty of
quasi-computers come through our testing doors but this one held up its end of
the bargain. It offers loads of
activities like typing skills, math testing, sentence structure drills and more.
Along with that comes the sense of laptop-like ownership with E-Power's
slick, compact, portable design. There
is the promise of e-mail, however we were unable to evaluate that feature.
Recommended Age: 8 and Up Price: $99.99
GeoSafari
Know It All
ExploraToy
Kids love to show off the stuff they know.
Since they were toddlers they beamed with pride when able to demonstrate
a skill. GeoSafari, for many years
a staple in classrooms around the country, is a showoff with pride type of toy.
Quizzes allow children to demonstrate their knowledge on an amazingly
vast number of subjects. The Know
It All, a laptop version of the original, is filled with 126 quiz cards on
everything from US State Identification to Dictionary Skills to the History of
Spacecraft! The well-crafted design
is easily portable, the membrane keyboard is very responsive and there is even a
volume control that is always a plus. Children
can quiz themselves or play against a friend.
When it comes to educational toys this is a good value.
Recommended Age: 8 and Up Price: $49.95
GeoSafari
Talking Globe
Educational
Insights
It's a globe...it's a quiz game. Well it's both really. On
top you'll find a very nicely detailed globe that spins effortlessly providing a
good map of the world with all its latest geographic boundaries.
The base of the Talking Globe is a speaking quizmaster that challenges
your child or a group of children to identify multiple-choice questions.
Some questions can be answered using the globe for reference while others
will be common knowledge. Given the
rather alarmingly low levels of geographic knowledge in today's children, this
is a important tool for study stations in a classroom as well as at home.
Recommended Age: 8 and up Price: $49.95
Spotlight on Science - Sports Science
Kit
Learning
Resources
If you think sports is all sweat and brawn, that opinion
will change after using this kit. What
we learned is that there really is a great deal of science behind sports.
This well thought out Sports Science Kit demonstrates through experiments
just how and why your body, and even sports equipment, reacts the way it does
during sporting events. Each
experiment card is very well written and children were captivated while
demonstrating that they fully understood each discipline.
Whether it was a hands on explanation of how to find the
"sweet-spot" of a baseball bat or understanding how a bicycle helmet
helps to protect your head, this is the kind of information that kids enjoyed
learning about. Teachers especially found the lesson plan to be first rate.
Recommended Age:
8 and Up
Price: $13.95
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Last Update: November 12, 1999