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ELC Play Food
by milliesmum123
When Millie was two I bought her this food set from The Early Learning Centre. She is now 5 and although it is not all in the best quality it is still very much loved and played with. This is yet another buy that I wasn't sure how long it would last but it's doing well! I think we paid £20 for it at the time and we bought a shopping ... basket to go with it too so we could store it all together.
=== Early Learning Centre ===
The Early Learning Centre is a great place. They have a wide variety of toys for young children. I'm not sure what age their toys go up to but I think they are mainly aimed at preschool age. I always find the quality of their things to be very good and the prices are really quite reasonable. Over the years we have bought lots of things from them and our house is slowly turning into a toy shop! Millie loves going in to the shop as they often have toys out on display for you to try and before Christmas they had even more too.
=== Food! ===
In this set is a lot of food! They range from ice creams and chocolates to a chicken leg and a red pepper. There is a lot of variety. It says that it is suitable for children from 2 years old and I think this is because of the small parts. The smallest item is a strawberry and a little tomato too. These I took away at first as Millie still liked to put things in her mouth and if we have friends with little ones come to play I remove these just to be on the safe side. A friend of mine has this set and as soon as she bought it she removed the chocolate, the biscuit and the icecreams as she wanted to encourage healthy eating only! I thought this was a bit extreme but each to their own I guess and so even if you do take a few away for whatever purpose you are still left with lots of food to play with.
=== Playing with it ===
Millie at first didn't play with it in a very imaginative way. She would just look at the food, turn the items over, admire them and had great fun posting them into the basket and carrying the basket around proudly. Over the years she has developed ways of playing with this food which is really cute. She has tea parties and sets the food out, she will pretend to go shopping and bring back food, she'll set it up on the floor pretending it's a shop. I love watching her and it's really cute to see her pretending to eat it and to make me my dinner. Her friends that come round enjoy playing with it too and they find it very amusing to concoct strange assortments such as fish with ice cream! I think one of the reasons why they enjoy playing with it so much and that it hasn't grown boring is that there is a lot of it so they have lots of choice.
=== Education ===
This food is educational. Not only can children learn about what different foods are but they can learn about cooking too. Some foods are quite rare in this- an aubergine for example and a slice of peach. Some children may not see these very regularly or at all so it's quite nice to think that you can teach your child about what foods look like through play. I have used these foods to help Millie recognise them and this seems to have improved her eating too. She was a bit fussy when we bought this and throughout the course of a few weeks I managed to get her to try a fried egg, we made one and then put it on a plate along with the plastic one from this set and she found it very amusing to pretend to eat one and then have a sneaky bite of the real one. Sometimes when we are playing with this we talk about what flavours may go together and recognise which are pudding foods, which are naughty foods (chips, crisps...) and which are savoury foods and things. As well as learning about food Millie is also learning to use her imagination when she is playing with this and it's so lovely to watch but also educational as she will learn to make sense of the world like this.
=== Quality ===
The quality of this set is good but not excellent. There are a few items which are a bit damaged now and two which we have thrown away. The little sausage that came in a hot dog style bun split into two once when it was being 'bitten' and so became a bit dangerous so we threw it away. The block of cheese got gnawed on by one of Millie's friends and it left sharp bits of plastic which would hurt if they were touched so that also got thrown away. The icecreams are a bit battered, they come out of the cones and can be put back in but one of them has been bent and now won't go back to it's normal shape. Aside from that the rest of the things are all in tact. The paint is coming of the yolk of the egg a bit actually but I think after 3 years of being played with on an almost daily basis that isn't too bad and also some of these things have found themselves being washed up a few times and also having been bitten a bit so they are not going to be perfect, they have done well to last so long actually!
=== Opinion ===
In my opinion this was a very good set to buy. There is a lot of variety of food which will help children to have fun and use their imaginations but will also help to educate them too in a subtle but fun way. Most of the food is very good quality and for it to have withstood a lot of play time the way it has is good. Millie plays with this set regularly, she would play with it every day if she could but sometimes I put it away as she tends to get the food everywhere and isn't the best at tidying up after herself! I am pleased we bought it and think we will have a few more years worth of play time out of it yet.
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ELC Happyland Rose Cottage
by daisy_jean
We've had Rose Cottage for almost a year now - my daughter received this for her 2nd birthday off a close friend, and it's been a firm favourite ever since!
>> The Cottage
The actual cottage is a downstairs/upstairs set up - it has an actual front and sides with door (that opens) and several windows, whilst having ... an open accessible back. Through the back, you can access the indoors set-up.
The downstairs has a living space and kitchen area, with interactive sounds (door bell, on the mat; cooker; television).
The upstairs has a bathroom, a double bed (the parents area) and bunk beds for the children!
>> What you get
As well as the actual interactive house, you get a collection of 5 figures - a "typical" 2x parents, a boy and a girl, and a dog. I'm guessing this is to depict a regular family, but as we all know this isn't always the case now - lifestyles have changed and so have family set-ups! There is also a 1 person car too.
>> The particulars
This retailed for £30 in Early Learning Centre shops and online for a period. As with ELC though, Happyland is regularly on offer, and it wasn't usually necessary to pay full price. This isn't available anymore through the website though, which suggests it was discontinued at the time of the Happyland redesign (more rounded corners, more toddler friendly!).
>> What we think
Personally in our household, this is a major hit. My daughter loves making up little roleplay situations with the figures, which tend to fit around what's going on at home (potty training has equaled a lot of figures visiting the cottage bathroom!). She enjoys the car, but doesn't use it a huge amount and probably wouldn't miss it if it were to go missing. However, the dog is a firm favourite, and is involved in every scenario!
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Early Learning Centre My First Talking Ted
by MissMonkeyMoo
When my other half had to go to the physio again recently for more treatment on his back, I found myself with an hour to kill at the nearby shopping centre, so I headed for Mothercare for a bit of a wander round. With a four month old daughter (now six months), I was interested to see what baby toys they had as she was becoming ever ... more interested in the world around her and seemed to ned constant stimulation. There were the usual collection of baby gyms, soft toys and dangly pram characters, but nothing really felt suitable. And then I saw this teddy bear sitting on the shelf.
The first thing that struck me about the bear was the fact that he looked quite traditional. All the other toys around the place were brightly coloured - which I understand babies react well to - or had neon sections, which makes them look a bit strange at times. This bear was as a teddy bear should be! Nice and simple with a proper teddy bear face and patches on his body. It reminded me of the teddy bears that I used to have as a child and so picked it up for a further look. The teddy is SO soft, unbelieveably so! It is perfect for the delicate skin of a baby, and on showing it to my daughter she immediately started to reach out for it whic I took as a good sign! When I did get the bear home and out of the packaging (more of that in a moment) she was able to lift and hold the bear with ease; the softness meant that my daughter could squish and grasp the bear to her hearts content! The ears were also just the right size for her to put into her mouth and suck - every toy that she has is treated the same way!
Each of the patches on the bear has a stitched star; when the patch is pressed the bear speaks a phrase and then sings a song. The phrase relates to the area pressed (eg/ "This is my foot. Tickle me") I liked this feature as this willl help to teach my daughter different words and parts of the body (nose, tummy, hand and foot) and the song will also help with her verbal skills in time. What I did find strange was that the voice coming out of the bear was female. Now the bear to me is a 'he' and this voice just doesn't match. The voice is pleasant enough - it is a very well spoken woman - but it just doesn't go with this bear! For this reason, the bear gets four stars instead of five. Nevertheless, my daughter loved the bear even more when she heard the voice coming out! A huge smile spread across her face and even now two months on (when she is bored of a lot of her other toys) this still remains a firm favourite and provokes a happy reaction every time it is played with.
The bear is suitable from ages 3 months which was also another reason for my impulse purchase - a lot of other musical toys are from suitable from six months and I really wanted something age appropriate as a lot of websites seem to think that giving children toys out of their age range can actually be detrimental to their wellbeing/development (I'm no expert but as a first-time mum, I'm just trying to do my best for my daughter!) The battery pack for the bear is small and cannot be felt my your child whilst is use. It is easy for an adult to access and there is an on/off switch if the talking and singing become too much for a parent to put up with! The singing hasn't bothered me at all, but it would have been nice if there was a volume control switch on the bear as the singing is of a decent volume and it would have been nice to have used the bear to settle my daughter down for her sleeps.
The bear comes in simple packaging, but has lots and lots of twisty-ties at the back for the adults to work their way through! I am fairly patient, but even I was losing my rag a little with just how many there were! This is only a minor thing though and doesn't detract from the bear itself in any way. The batteries were also included which is good as it is really frustrating to buy a toy, get it home and then find you haven't got any means of switching it on! I paid £16 for the bear and it is without a doubt well worth the money. It is my daughters favourite toy, and as well as being something for her to love and cuddle, she will be able to interact with it when she is older and able to join in with the singing.
Such is the appeal of this bear that when I was round my in-laws at the weekend I left him safely tucked up in the corner of the room only to watch him being paraded around the house by my fourteen month old neice who had discovered upon him after dinner. She wouldn't let him go again and my daughter only got her teddy back when my neice fell asleep and we snuck off home!
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