The Bub in the Belly

I've mentioned the Noddy Fun Book a few times on the blog. We have two sets - one we bought ourselves, the other was a gift from a friend for Ryan for his 2nd birthday back in January 2011 (thanks so much, Sue Lin!).

Each set comes with 10 Fun Books, the flip-grid with 12 numbered tiles, 10 colour pens and a parent's guide. Each Fun Book has a different theme - shapes, numbers, upper case letters, lower case letters, math, colours, time, animals, plants, weather. There are 15 games of three varying levels of difficulty in each Fun Book. You can read the reviews on it on the internet, I won't go into all that here.

We have been playing for it for some time now and Ryan has pretty much worked through all the Fun Books already. His favourites are the ones with letters and numbers. Ryan loves the games - he will, of his own accord, drag the set from the shelf (it's pretty heavy) and ask us to sit down and play with him. Often he will play through one Fun Book (15 games) in one go, and start all over with the same Fun Book (another 15 games). There was once he went through a Fun Book three times in one sitting!

We bought our set from the Tensai shop in Shichida when they were having a sale (we have used it a couple of times in Shichida class), and you can also get it online. I can't remember how much we paid for it at the Tensai shop but I think you can get it online for about $75 (or thereabouts) so, as 10 Fun Books with 15 games each adds up to 150 games, it would translate to about $2 per game. Factor in the fact that Ryan plays the games repeatedly, I would say it is very good value for us.

Here's a Youtube video (about 7:20 minutes long) of Ryan in action with the Noddy Fun Book. We were in Malaysia when the video was filmed. It's a little longer than the usual videos I show on the blog, because I wanted to show the whole process of setting up the flip grid, executing the game and checking the result, plus I wanted to show an example from each of the three levels of difficulty. You can see that it is really easy to operate - Ryan needs absolutely no help to go through the process.