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ELC Animal Magic Sounds Aquadoodle
by Chippytarka
I bought this toy around 3 years ago for my son. My goal really was to buy him something that he could be creative with, but to be honest didnt create too much mess. The though of paint, felt tips, crayons etc scared me alittle bit and thought at the time I would go for the safer and cleaner option.
What is this ... product?
This is a mat, that children can draw on with a special ' pen '. The pen itself only needs to be filled with water, and when the mat is marked with the pen, on some areas you can see patterns come through on the mat, but also they can generally just draw on it as the water leaves marks on the mat, and after afew minutes the marks made disappear so the children/child can start all over again.Very similar idea to the magic books/markers that we used to get as children many moons ago.
The mat itself is square in size, not to big but not too small.Measures roughly 30x30cm . The centre area is clear and white in colour, to allow the children to draw and have fun.Around the middle is green with farm type animals dotted all around the side.Very birght and colourful.
To use the mat to draw on, simply unscrew the top of the pen and fill with water. Screw back on. You can use the pen on its own ( but its abit too small and fiddly ) but better to pop in the pen holder as its quite chunky and easy for little hands to hold and control.
Not only can you draw on the mat, but the pen can be placed in a yellow ' pen holder '. This ' pen holder' can be attached ( the bottom of it ) to seven different areas of the mat that are placed around the edge of it. Once slotted on the top of these areas ( its a raised circle ), it gives of a particular noise that corresponds to the picture next to it e.g theres a duck, sheep, horse, chicken, dog, cow and tractor and each circle provides their sound.
Starting age for using this product is recommended at 18 months old.
So what do I think of this product?
Its one of those toys we recently grabbed out of the toy box because my daughter now is into drawing, and I thought it would be ideal for her to play on and not create too much mess.Its something that both my children enjoy using, and its great for me for a couple of reasons;
1. Only needs water so no clean up.
2. Can be stored away completely flat, takes up no room what so ever.
Acouple of downsides I have noticed this time around. One is the fact originally it only came with one pen and one pen holder.Not ideal if you have two children.So it would have been nice to have had two, even if its for one child, a spare is always handy. The pen is quite small and easily lost ( we lost ours ages ago, but managed to find another one as we have a similar mat with a pen already ), so there should have been some way to attach it to the mat to keep it safe.
The pen only takes a small amount of water at a time, so if they are using it like crazy, you will be running to the sink very fequently.
If its only water that gets on the mat, you have no problem.But if the children decide to be alittle more creative with what they put on it, then it can be ruined.Currently we have some lovely ink stains from an ink pad on it.In general its not hard to clean, give it a wipe with a damp cloth, but some things arent going to come off so easily.
Would I buy this again?
I would, but the product itself does need to be tweaked alittle bit ( as mentioned ). Its easy clean fun with no clean up afterwards. It helps children learn alittle about animals in regards to what animals make what sounds and it helps build their imagination with the drawing aspect and helps build on their sensory skill of hearing and seeing. Its also great for children of quite a varied age range.
I did buy this such along time ago, so cant recall exactly how much it cost, but I did get it in the sale from toys r us and it was below the £15.00. This normally retailed at the time for around th £20.00-£25.00 mark.
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ELC Twirl and Paint
by Mrb84
We bought this for our daughter when she turned three. It looked, from the picture, to be great fun and a chance for her to get a bit messy whilst painting without it being completely crazy mess-wise. We were disappointed by it to say the least and think that it has many areas in which it needs to improve.
What is ... it?
Well! The packaging makes you believe that it is a spinning table which will enable your children to have endless hours of fun creating messy pictures! In reality it is a piece of plastic rubbish which doesn't even work and if it did your little one would probably only have about 2 minutes of fun as the paint tubes they provide you with are tiny!
It is a blue plastic table in which you place a piece of paper which secures into place. This piece of paper then can be spun round by pressing a button. Whilst it spins round the idea is to squirt paint from the tubes into the table and onto the paper. The spinning motion will create lots of interesting patterns.
What you get
Well I cannot complain about the amount of paper that this comes with. I haven't counted them as I do indeed have a life but I would say there are about 50 pieces of paper which are cut to shape ready to be used. This paper is glossy. You also get three little paint tubes with lids. These are orange, green and purple. These are very very tiny indeed but quite easy to squeeze.
Playing with it
Well Little B was very excited by this as it did look very fun and Mrs B was eager to set it up to have some creative fun with her. It didn't take more than a minute to set up as all you have to do is put the paper in place and off you go! But in reality this is not exciting. The button you press is stiff and makes a big clunking noise and it only seems to spin the paper if pressed in a specific place and even then it's not certain if it will spin properly or just kind of slowly move round in a very fed up fashion. When it does spin round it is probably for about 6 seconds and so you need to press it again which makes it difficult for young children to use as it's hard to do that and squeeze paint. When it did spin round fast Little B would squirt some paint and then when it stopped we waited in avid excitement to see the swirls... there were no swirls, more like lines of paint which did not look very artisitic or exciting at all and if she used more than one colour they just mingled together in a grubby brown colour. What was worse was once it tried, because the paper is shiny, it all went very, very dull indeed unlike how you would expect as the paint colours themselves are very bright. What made it worse is that after just one play with this the paints ran out and all she did was create four little tiny square 'pictures' so we now have another 46 pieces of paper but no more paint. We could of course buy some more but we don't see why we should when it's such a poor piece of plastic that doesn't even spin properly and just frustrates our daughter!
What Little B thinks
This definitely did not entertain her for more than about 5 minutes and even during that time she was more frustrated than amused. She couldn't work out how to get it to spin properly and when Mummy B helped her to spin it it was disappointing to see that it only lasted a second and quite often this was not long enough for her to have squirted out paint and had it swirl round. She was disappointed when she tried to get it out to play with a few days later and realised the paint had ran out.
Conclusion
This is really a rubbish toy which could be so much better if they improved it. They need to make it actually spin with ease and for more than a few seconds. It also needs to come with more paint and for the paper not to be shiny so that it doesn't dry a dull brown colour. I am very disappointed with this and think it's not even worth £1 let alone the £8 we paid for it! It is very poorly made and you can tell it's not been trialed properly. We are not impressed and expected something from The Early Learning Centre to be much better than this. Definitely do not recommend.
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