Category Archives: Educational Toys

Cranium Bloom: Let’s Play Count & Cook Game

Age 3-5, Age 5-7, Educational Toys, Games

Craniumbloomcountgame
Cranium® Bloom™
 is a new line of games, books, puzzles, and toys for preschoolers ages 3+ and they are so much fun!

We tried out the Cranium® Bloom™ Let’s Go to the Zoo Seek & Find puzzle and the Cranium®
Bloom™ Let’s Play Count & Cook game. 
Here is our review of the Count & Cook game.

Kids inherently have a negative attention span which is why I love the Cranium®
Bloom™ games.  The Cranium®
Bloom™ Let’s Play Count & Cook game takes about 10 minutes to play and they are fun filled and educational.  In the box you will find a sturdy game board, 20 ingredient tokens, 4 chef movers, recipe book, and die. 

First your child will choose one of the 6 chef movers to play with.  Then she will put it on her favorite ingredient token all of which are on the board when the game starts.  Mom picks a recipe from the book and places it where everyone can reach it. Then all of the players work together to make the same recipe.   Players roll the die on their turn and move the number of spaces shown on the die. If she lands on an ingredient needed for the recipe, she adds the token to the recipe.  Kids can have fun when they land on a star by choosing any ingredient they want to add to the recipe.  The player who adds the last ingredient is top chef and opens a secret window in the recipe book for a surprise.

>Get a closer look at Cranium®
Bloom™ products below:   

Other ways we had fun with the game was by choosing a few ingredient tokens, handing them out to the kids and having them find the ingredient in our kitchen.  Some ingredients are simple while others require a bit of searching.  If you are brave enough, you can even have your child help you make one of the recipes.. for real!

Cranium®
Bloom™ Let’s Play Count & Cook game is available at Amazon.com for $12.99 and is appropriate for ages 3+. 


Cranium Bloom: Let’s Go to the Zoo Seek & Find puzzle

Age 3-5, Age 5-7, Educational Toys, , , ,

Cranium® Bloom™
 is a new line of games, books, puzzles, and toys for preschoolers ages 3+ and they are so much fun! We tried out the Cranium® Bloom™ Let’s Go to the Zoo Seek & Find puzzle and the Cranium® Bloom™ Let’s Play Count & Cook game.

Let’s Go to the Zoo Seek & Find puzzle is not just a puzzle but a seek and find game as well making it a puzzle that your preschooler will want to put together and play over and over again.  The puzzle pieces are large for little hands, and the picture is made up of whimsical, vibrant images of zoo animals.

Get a closer look at Cranium® Bloom™ products below.

First your preschooler will piece together the puzzle. Then you will choose a book of cards, beginner or advanced. Each book includes 15 seek & find cards that show an image or a color for your child to find in the puzzle.  Three year olds should start with the beginner book which asks the child to find things like ‘something blue’, and ‘3 lions’. The color or the requested image is shown on the card so your preschooler can use the card as a reference.  The book and cards in next level, advanced, request that your child find things like ‘something that starts with a Z’ and ‘5 bananas’.
When your child finds the requested color, or image(s) she uses the included erasable pen to circle it, then you move on to the next card in the book until all of the images or colors in the book are found.


Cranium® Bloom™ products are available at Amazon.com or on the Cranium® website.

Table Topics – a conversation starter and more

Age 5-7, Age 7-10, Ages 10-13, Educational Toys, Fun stuff for parents

TabletopicsWe all know how important it is that the whole family eat dinner together every night, but do we always
have something to talk about?  When I ask Sebastian what he did at school today, he says "not much". "Did you learn anything?", I ask.  "not really", he says. When he wants to talk, he’ll talk until we ask him to please stop. He can talk your ear off.  When he doesn’t want to talk though, it’s a different story. Dinner time is one of those times when it’s hard to get him to talk to us.

Now that we’ve got Table Topics Sebastian enjoys dinner time. He knows that he can tell us stories, and ideas, and give us answers to all sorts of questions like "what would you do if you were invisible for a day?" and we won’t tell him to stop talking. We do however, put a time limit on his answers as he tends to go on and on and on if we don’t.

Table Topics take up minimal space on your table and come in a clear, attractive container that will match any room decor. 

There are currently seven Table Topics themes including family, girls night out, teens, couples, and more.  I have found that the dinner table isn’t the only time to whip out the Table Topics cards. When Sebastian can’t seem to find anything to do except watch TV, I choose a Kids Topics To Go card with a question that would spark his interest and ask him to turn his answer into a story. He really enjoys writing stories and the Kids Topics To Go is a great starting point.

Times to use Table Topics and Topics To Go:

  • Dinner time
  • When kids are bored they can’t write a story based on a Kids To Go question
  • While traveling
  • At a restaurant
  • Slumber parties
  • Playgroup (for the moms)
  • There are many more times and places to use Table Topics and Topics To Go

Get your kids talking again with Table Topics!

WEBSITE: Table Topics

School Zone interactive products

Age 3-5, Age 5-7, Age 7-10, Educational Toys

Schoolzone_interactiveSebastian has so much fun with his School Zone Puzzle Play workbooks. I’m a computer geek so I love to see Sebastian doing something constructive on his computer.

The School Zone Interactive products include a workbook and a CD-ROM.  The workbook is full of colorful mazes and the software provides 30 creative backgrounds on which Sebastian can create his own maze puzzle. Sebastian designs the path of his maze from a "Start" point to the "Finish." Children can use a mouse to design their maze path or they can use the arrow keys. I love this feature. Some kids get frustrated with the mouse, so having the option to use the keyboard keys is great.  When Sebastian finishes his path, the computer fills in the rest of the maze with misleading and dead-end pathways.

After Sebastian creates his maze, he can solve the puzzle with a race against the clock, or a little computer guy which Sebastian prefers.

Sebastian’s second favorite Puzzle Play workbook is the Hidden Pictures. The workbook comes with over 50 colorful hidden pictures pages. The CD-ROM is a little more challenging to figure out but once your child gets it, he will have a blast!  Your child adds objects on top of a picture and then the objects magically sink into the picture. To solve the puzzle, the person playing it is shown the picture with a grid on it. By selecting coordinate points, the player can direct a funny character to dig at the point he or she selected.
To add some excitement (even more!), your child also embed goodies and gags.

School Zone Puzzle Play workbooks are geared for children ages 6-8 but we have a few 5 year old product testers use the workbooks and software and they did just fine with a little supervision.

Where to buy: School Zone