My seven year-old daughter was needing an alarm clock for her bedside - not because she needs to set an alarm yet, but mostly so she could play CDs and listen to the radio on something that wasn’t a hand-me-down. The Hello Kitty clock radio had all the things we wanted (alarm, CD player and radio) so we decided to try it out and review it for Modern Day Dad.
This is what she thought of it:
The clock radio looks really cool in my bedroom because it’s pink and has Hello Kitty on it. I like that it has a radio and a CD player. The best thing about this alarm clock is that they put all of those things together. The clock is very easy to read (because it’s digital) and sometimes in the middle of the night I think to myself “What time is it?” so I look at the clock. It has an alarm too, but I don’t use it.
Currently my children have Smurf fever. In the early part of the summer they went through a mild obsession with the Smurfs iPad game and spent weeks trying to farm enough fruit and flowers to earn Sumurfette. The iPad game also did a pretty good job of introducing them to all the characters as well as hyping the movie (which releases today - 7/29). They even used their Build-A-Bear gift cards from their birthdays to get the “exclusive” Smurfette and Clumsy Smurf. Trust me, I’m pretty Smurfed-out these days.
Their favorite video game on the Wii however is “Just Dance 2” - a dancing game where you dance along to pop songs (either by yourself or with friends) and the Wii manages to give you points based on how well you are following along. It’s a great game - fun to play and probably funnier to watch someone else playing. And the fact that they are up ad moving around kind of assuages the parent’s guilt that they are letting their kids play a video game when they could be outside doing something. Kind of.
So when I got the opportunity to review the new Smurf video game for the Wii - “The Smurfs Dance Party” it seemed like a perfect fit.
[This review is the first post co-written with my six (almost seven) year-old daughter. This summer we're doing all sorts of new things, not the least of which is helping Dad with some blogging...]
The Big Book of HOW from Time Magazine's series "Time for Kids" is not only about how things work, but also about how to do things yourself. Imagine a book full of questions that a young adult might ask, like "How were the pyramids built?" or "How do you prepare for an earthquake?" Except in addition to the answers, there are experiments (or "crafts" as my daughter called them) to illustrate how the things work in real-life. Here's what she had to say:
