Crayola have really let the side down with this product (Crayola Beginnings My First Easel)

Member Name: abbadabbado

Product:	Crayola Beginnings My First Easel
Date:	11/06/09 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: there really aren't any

Disadvantages: read the review, too many to mention here

I was really excited last Christmas when I found the Crayola Beginnings My First Easel on the Amazon website for the bargain price of £11.99. I had been searching for some kind of easel for her for a while, but because she was still little I didn't think that upright ones were such a good idea until she was a bit bigger.
The easel is a table top easel and comes with four different activities and two ways of displaying the easel. It all sounded too good to be true, and from a trusted make such as Crayola I really couldn't go wrong.

When the easel arrived I had a quick look at it before putting it away for Christmas. I remember when my daughter opened the box with a little help from me and Daddy, her little face lit up. He loved drawing even at a young as that she was last Christmas, so we knew this was going to be a hit with her.
As we set the easel up, we realised it already came pre set up and could be positioned as a table top easel or could be hung on the wall if you chose to, there was a cute little hole in the plastic ready to hang with a picture hook or something similar..
Instantly I could tell the plastic, whilst brightly coloured wasn't as sturdy as I would like it for a one year old to be playing with it. It stayed in the correct position when put together, but one knock from an unsteady toddle sent it flying across the table and all the bits with it.
I remember raising my eyebrows at my partner on Christmas morning. I had thought I had bought a great product but it wasn't looking too great five minutes after opening it.

The easel has two sides to it, one being a gel filled substance which acts like a doodle board that you can wipe clean after use and the other has a magic water surface that acts like the aqua draws and will dry clean after a while.
To use the gel filled side the child has to use the shapes that are supplied with the easel. There are little egg head shapes that have a square, circle and triangle on the bottom of them. This is designed to encourage children to learn the different shapes as they press them into the gel surface leaving an imprint behind them.
Before we first used the gel surface I could see there were marks where it has possibly settle in transit. Undeterred I tried it first and found I had to press really hard into the surface to get an imprint of the shape to show. I am an adult though and could press hard at the same time as supporting myself on the back of the easel. My one year old was going to have no hope. You guessed it the easel went flying as she tried to press the shape into the surface.

Never mind on we went to the water pen side. This was bound to be better as she already loved her aqua draws so this could be a permanent fixture that she could play with all the time. The pen was attached to the easel with a string, and it didn't even reach the top of the board. I groaned to myself when I realised this as how is a child supposed to be creative when they can't use the tools provided correctly.
The pen needs to be filled with water obviously and when used on the board it shows up in rainbow colours. This was pretty but we also found that the pen was a bit leaky so there were not proper lines being drawn even by an adult, more dribbles down the board.

Back to the last function of the easel, and this was a shape sorter. We wondered where this was to start with until we realised the shapes that go onto the gel surface can be put back into the holders and this acts as a shape sorter. I was beginning to think Crayola had lost the plot by this time and were really grasping at straws to make the product multi functional and failing miserably.

The easel stayed out for about a month but my daughter got so frustrated with it as she couldn't get anything to work properly on it through no fault of her own that we soon put it back in the box. It's a shame I didn't try it out when I bought it as it would have gone straight back to Amazon.
Overall I really would suggest you stay away from this product. It's not worth any money let alone the £11.99 I paid for it at the time. The plastic just isn't string enough to act as an easel to start with without the extra features being so poor it lets the whole product down.
Considering this has been made by Crayola, it's a real let down by the company as I can usually not fault them at all.

Summary: a rubbish easel for toddlers