Wednesday, December 4, 2024
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Keeping Little Minds Active This Easter With Spinmaster

AD – Gifted

You never really know what you’re going to get with the Easter school holidays. Some years it’s hot and sunny and some years it’s wet and miserable!

Obviously this year is a bit different and most of us have been looking for as many things as possible to keep our young ones entertained after a few weeks already confined to the house!

Our friends at Spinmaster kindly sent us a few things to help keep Joshua entertained and they have already proven to be a big hit between short bursts on the trampoline and longer bursts of Lego Worlds and Zoo Tycoon on the xBox!

Meccano Dinosaurs

Meccano Dinosaurs

I loved building with Meccano as a child and I’m hoping Joshua will enjoy it just as much. This excellent set enables you to build ten different dinosaurs. It comes with the various metal pieces, including all the nuts and bolts so it feels like a ‘proper’ building set, for want of a less generic word!

Meccano Dinosaurs

It’s aimed at ages 8+ but younger children like Joshua can still get a lot of enjoyment out of it with some gentle parenting input – i.e. I needed to help hold some of the bits while he tightened them!

As you can imagine with a building set made of metal, it’s very sturdy and goes together nicely, albeit you do need some very nimble fingers to attach some of the nuts. The first dinosaur design Joshua chose had full instructions and took us about an hour to work our way through. I think it turned out rather nicely…

The dinosaur set retails around the £12 mark and given you can make ten different dinosaurs I thought it was really good value. It’s available at all good retailers including through the affiliate Amazon link below.

Kinetic Sand Rainbow Mix Set

Kinetic Sand Rainbow

This is another kids favourite that has been around for a few years now, but this time it’s all about COLOUR!

The set comes with the Kinetic Sand in the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow. It also has a stamper with a choice of 3 stamps and a scraper.

What we found quite clever is the fact you can mix two colours together to create secondary colours of purple, orange and green. This is done by creating blocks of coloured sand inside the stamper and then mixing equal parts together by hand.

Kinetic Rainbow

From there you can add layer by layer or different colours and stamp them down with one of your stampers inside the clear tube. This creates a really rather cool tube of different colours as below.

You can then slice through your rainbow creation, mix it up a bit and put it back inside the tube to make a new colour scheme. It’s actually quite fun and therapeutic!

There’s enough of the primary coloured Kinetic Sand to make a decent few colourful tubes and it’s genuinely quite good fun. It’s aimed at ages 3+ and it pretty accessible to all ages, although the older the child the less gets dropped on the carpet I’d imagine!

The Kinetic Sand Rainbow mix kit retails for around £10 at major retailers including the affiliate Amazon link below.

Owleez

We were lucky enough to win a lovely Owleez in the run up to Christmas and Joshua had a great time teaching it to fly over the festive period!

It’s a very interactive creature that you can stroke, feed, swoosh around and eventually teach to fly. It’s all good fun, but obviously the flying part is the real show-stopper!

If you’ve looked after your Owleez well enough it will make a triumphant sound, its propellor wings will start to rotate and it will zoom off into the sky for a few seconds before ‘landing gracefully’ back on the deck. It really is a sight to behold!

Owleez currently retails for around the £20 mark and is genuinely a lot of fun for all ages. Affiliate Amazon link below.

Hatchimals Spring Bouquet

We were really impressed when we tried these out recently and they are perfect for the Easter holidays. Basically it’s a bunch of tulips with each bloom containing a cute little Hatchimal which you can then display on top of the stems.

Hatchimals spring bouquet

For more details check out our full review here!

Uni-Verse Unicorns

We also tried out these Uni-Verse Unicorns recently. You take your cloud out of the packet and pop it in a bowl of warm water to watch the magic happen! It’s fun to see it dissolve in front of your eyes and to find out what collectible unicorn you get and what colour the water turns.

Uni-verse unicorns

The collectibles are actually really cute and have a lot of detail, so with the dissolving element, the surprise collectibles and the awesome unicorns it’s a good little package. For £5 per pack it won’t break the bank either!

Whatever you get up to this Easter I hope you have an awesome time and that this little guide has given you a few eggcelent ideas!

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