Astronomy and star-gazing has always been a great dad and child experience. Nothing beats lying on the grass on a warm August evening staring up in the sky and conveying the majesty and mystery of the heavens to a small child. This is a completely free activity, there are also plenty of accessories around if you’re so inclined. Here are a few of our favorites this year:

1.
Moon in my room - $39 - This light up moon hangs on your wall and shows the moon in 12 different settings, controlled by an infrared remote control. An audio CD tells more about the moon.

2.
Planisphere watch - $59.95 - This watch glows in the dark for 2-3 hours. It’s a great present for the astronomy geek who always wants to take advantage of a dark night sky. The watch shows northern constellations only.

3.
Celestron Skyscout - $199 (50% cheaper than in 2007) - The Skyscout uses GPS to ID and 8000 starts and planets and then will even tell you about via audio or text. All the astronomer has to do is point this gadget into the night sky and it actually finds constellations for you. As one reviewer on Amazon says, “This is the astronomy device I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

4. Orion Star Target Planisphere ” target=”_blank”>Orion Star Target Planishere - $11.00 - This stargazing the old fashioned way, with a map of the heavens you hold up in the night sky. You’ll also need a red flashlight to read the map in the dark.

5.
Barska Travel Telescope - 59.95 - Savings priced telescope for aspiring astronomers with 300X magnification and a 5×24 finder scope. Don’t expect the world, but this is a good intro telescope. Minor to major inconvenience is the table level telescope. It’s perfect for setting up on a picnic table and taking turns looking from there, but impossible to use at ground level.

Happy stargazing!

Guess Who Travel Game - Our kids loved this simple game that teaches kids deductive reasoning as they eliminate suspects to find the last person standing. By asking questions of their competitor like “does the person where glasses” or “have blond hair,” kids can easily play the game even before they can read. It’s an easy to pack travel game, or for playing at home. Unfortunately, the cards, however, are easily lost so it takes an adult around to keep from losing all the parts. My kids played this so many time though, they broke the pieces off the hinges before they lost any cards. $10.45 (a bit more expensive than you would think for a game built like this, but we did get our money’s worth.)

Thomas Great Race is a fun game for small kids, especially those who love Thomas. The directions are very easy and involve moving Thomas characters up a hill based on correct answers to very simple questions.

Because the questions have to be read, this is a game that requires close involvement with an adult or with an older child.

Happily for bored parents, games are mercifully short because of the construction of the game. You push the trains up based on the numbers written on the cards drawn by players. Since just two or three correct answers send the trains down the hill, the game ends quickly

As with a lot of games like this, adults have to quickly make peace with the fact this is not a game developed for them. Our kids, too, were only willing to play the game a few times “by the rules,” and then went on to moving the pieces around under the direction of my four year old boy. The game would be stronger if there were ideas for multiple things that could be played with the game and different rules for new games.

MSRP: $22.95

Pros

1. Good introduction to how to play a game with specific rules.

2. Popular Thomas characters excite little kids.

Cons

1. No other variations on the game so may have limited lifespan.

2. Game is artificially short due to construction.

As hard as it is to believe, I actually played with a Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven when I was about six or seven years old. I was excited to try this out the Easy Bake Oven from Hasbro with my own kids, a four year old boy and eight year old girl. There was great excitement at the house when we opened it up, which was tempered a bit when we had to first search for a 100 W lightbulb to make it work. I could remember that we were always amazed that a simple light bulb could power an oven.

The kit includes small pans to cook in and one measuring spoon. We had to assume to that the measuring spoon was the correct size for the recipes (2/3 T), but it was not. Three ingredients packages were also included for cake, cookies and frosting.

Accessory packages exist for other kitchen tools, as well as more cake mixes. There are no directions for making cakes from other recipes, rather from the collection of other Hasbro cake mixes.

My daughter, at eight, enjoyed the toy, but said she’d rather cook in a real oven. My son enjoyed eating the cookies, but was easily distracted during the baking.

While the box says for “eight and older,” this looks like a toy for slightly younger kids with supervision. My daughter has been baking since age four, so she thought that real baking was easier than using the oven. My recommendation would be to use this for kids 5-7, but with very close adult supervision. Alternately, my daughter said she’d play with this unsupervised with another friend, but would require a lot more ingredients packs, or home-made mixes.

MSRP: $24.95

Pros:

1. Exciting for young bakers

2. Good-tasting cookies and cakes

Cons:

1. Hard to keep smaller kids from wanting to stick everything inside the oven. This toy requires supervision.

2. Too few recipes and not enough to be satisfying. You’ve only just learned to use the oven by the time you make the three included recipes. There are no recipes either using regular box mixes or normal cake ingredients. This would be frustrating for young kids who either want to continue baking, or want to use the toy on a following day. You’ll have to do some investigating on line (search “easy bake oven recipes”) to find “from scratch” recipes for them to follow or pre-mix for them.

3. Making the batter for cookies and cakes required another pan, which was fine though unexpected.

The Cloud B Sea Turtle is a fun addition to the nighttime routine. My kids say it helps them get to sleep because is has a soothing light. I like it because it turns their entire room into a planetarium, with choices of blue or green stars (and a moon). Stargazing has always been a special time for me with the kids and, while they can’t always figure out what I’m pointing at, they like the time lying on the grass staring up at the sky with daddy and talking about ’stuff.’ While the Cloud B Sea Turtle, and it’s other endangered animal constellation brothers, can’t replace that experience, it reminds of good times we’ve had and to come. The lights turn off after 45 minutes, which is usually long after they’ve fallen asleep.

LEGO City Advent Calendar 2008 - If you wait very much longer this cool advent calendar will be sold out for Christmas. This calendar has absolutely nothing to do with the holiday, but kids love to open up the little parts every day at breakfast, counting down the days ’till they have more stuff to open. Make sure to get a little plastic box as well to hold all the little tiny parts. Once the tiny pieces are assembled, they come apart and end up all over the house.

Lego CASTLE Advent Calendar 2008

LEGO City Advent Calendar (2007)

Play-doh Magic Swirl is a fun toy for kids over four years old. Kids like the many forms you can use to make ice cream-like objects and have a lot of fun playing waiter for hours on end. My kids made up menus and served us ice creams over and over. The play-doh colors are vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and something like sprinkles. The machine part is the lever that pushes the play-doh into a soft-serve swirl. Smaller devices to the side make it easy to make “sprinkles” and gloppy “whipped cream.” Dads, even, will enjoy playing with this for a few minutes since it’s pretty captivating how play-doh can be manipulated into miniature, yet “life-like” forms.

Unfortunately, the setup does not fold back up so once it’s out of the box, it’s hard to put away neatly. This is unfortunate since it’s hard to really clean all the little bits of play-doh off it, and it does eventually shed a lot of play-doh crumbs all around its environs.

All in all, though, a fun toy for around $15, and good for amusing little kids, albeit with a fair amount of adult supervision.

Note from my daughter: I’ m eight and I like it. I think it is fun but over time it gets a little messy. The only problems I have with it are that my brother messes up the colors and also you can’ t clean it out.

Self propelled car - rides like magic.

Affordable at $79, and less upkeep than a real horse! From Dayla Baby

Our computer DVD has been having problems and little by little we lost the ability to run any kids games that need a DVD to run. Now that it’s fixed, the kids are re-discovering their old friends,
I Spy Mystery and I Spy Fantasy from Scholastic. Both of these games keep them spellbound literally for hours. And, like a good crossword puzzle, they can jump back into them at any point without losing interest. And like a crossword, they can ask for help (and they do!) all the time, and it’s easy, and fun, for adults to peak in and join them in their quest for objects and words hidden in fantasy landscapes and setttings.

If you enjoy the I Spy books, you’ll also enjoy these fantasy games. The illustrations, mini-toys, and riddles, while simple enough for a small child, can even keep an adult interested and involved. My kids, at just four and just eight, enjoy these games and play together finding things. My young son needs some help reading the clues, but even this is made easy by the software that re-reads the direction with a simple scroll-over. These games are good at teaching basic computer skills, but also problem–solving, cause and effect, reading, following directions, and logic. I’d recommend these as a great gift for young kids, or as a diversion for kids during long trips. Since the illustrations are chock-full of tiny images, the software alters the game each time making each playing a new discovery.

$19.99 and less (some even at $6 at Amazon) and most run on both Mac and Windows.