Dora the Explorer is a Nickelodeon cartoon character that has certainly captured the hearts of children all over the world. Every day, she goes into an adventure with her best friend Boots the Monkey and meet other friends along the way. Children follow Dora to find the place she is going to and also tries to help her find her way.
Dora Cooking Games
Dora the explorer will start out with a greeting and will tell you about her recipe book. Once you click her recipe book, you will find several recipes and the photo of the food that you can make with her. Browse through her recipe book with your daughter and ask her to choose the food she wants to cook. Once she has chosen, click the photo of the food and Dora will send you to her kitchen.
In her kitchen, you will find several ingredients needed to cook the food. Dora will show you a photo of the ingredient she is looking for and you and your daughter will have to find it all over the kitchen. You can also open the cabinets and refrigerator to see if the ingredients are there. You will have to complete 6-7 ingredients before Dora can cook the food. Once you have completed the set of ingredients, Dora’s Papi will come out and do the cooking as it can be pretty dangerous for a little girl like Dora to cook by herself. Like many of the Dora Games, Dora cooking games are pretty simple and can be easily taught to your children.
It can develop their exploration, discovering and reading skills. Searching for the ingredient can be a challenge for them but it will also teach them to identify the ingredients and the things in the kitchen. Dora will guide your child each step of the way until the food has been cooked. After that, your kid can play again and try out other foods from the recipe book. The game is a great way for you to bond with your kids as well as teaching them about the kitchen.
Filed under Educational Games by on Jun 14th, 2011. Comment. 
It’s pretty easy to create backyard playgrounds for your children as all you’ll need are a few important components:
- Children (naturally!)
- A backyard (goes without saying)
- Time
- Money
- A love of DIY!
When my children were a lot younger, my husband and I set to and built a couple of wooden playsets. We opted for the least expensive route, which involved buying the swings and slides and what have you in a kit form, then calling at a local lumber yard and purchasing the timber separately.
We enlisted the help of my brother and a friend and over a period of about two years, we built two different wooden outdoor playsets. And by two years I don’t mean that’s how long it took us to build them, so much as we built the first one in a weekend (once we’d got all the separate gear) and the second one we bought and added a couple of years down the line.
For our kids they were a great addition to the backyard and for us a complete godsend. At the time we didn’t live close enough to a public park pr playcenter so the alternative was coming up with a sensible way of utilizing the enormous space we had out back.
Back then the bottom part of the yard was a little neglected and we’d wondered for a while what we could do with it. As the kids got older we decided to turn it over to them and eventually turned to whole bottom part into a backyard playground. It became the place to hang for our kids friends, as well as a place for my friends and family’s kids to play when we had cookouts or parties.
I know that price wise they can seem kinda daunting but if you can be bothered to to a lot of the work yourself, they’re hugely rewarding and easily become (for our children at least) the favorite place to be when at home. One of our two wooden playsets was centered around a fort, with cool features like monkey bars, swings and a small climbing wall.
The fort part became a kind of club house when they got older. It was pretty big from the outset as we altered that initial layout on order to create a bigger ‘building’. It wasn’t hard to do, more the effort involved as it took longer to assemble! In all I’m a big fan of creating an outdoor space for your children to play.
It allows them to play naturally and to relax away from their parents. It also encourages socialization and imaginative play and, ultimately, they play educational games without even realizing. A definite plus for any backyard, and a highly recommended method of allowing your children to play in a safe environment that’s right outside!
Filed under Educational Toys by on Jun 3rd, 2011. Comment.
Many parents wonder exactly what are educational toys, what is it that they do and are they worth buying in the first place?
The odd thing about educational games and learning toys is that most parents by them anyway, inadvertently or not. This is down to the fact that a parent’s awareness is kind of bypassed by the toy manufacturers. The toy designers and producers focus their attention on demand, and this naturally leans towards toys that engage and encourage young minds in imaginative play.
Just as Mother Nature intended, children logically move towards a growing sense of independence, and this process is embraced in stages. Providing that a child receives the required amount of stimulation as he or she grows, the developmental stages will be accomplish and conquered.
As each stage is realized (and all children will get there in their own time) then the next one lies ahead. This could be simple (early) motor skills, such as hand/eye coordination, or something more complex, such as learning to communicate and talk. Each and every phase requires a different form of stimulation (and guidance from mom and dad) and that’s where educational toys come in.
A simple colorful rattle (the type that double up as a teether and a toy), will help a small baby to develop their hand/eye coordination, to the point that they learn to grasp and guide their movements with the required dexterity. A baby walker or push toy is designed to encourage a child to walk, in the same way that board books help to lay down the early foundations required for reading and communication skills.
In many ways, educational toys are a must-have aspect of child-rearing, and whether or not a parent fully understands exactly what they are is mildly irrelevant in the face of what it is that they provide. Between Mother Nature, a child’s natural curiosity and the way in which modern toys are designed, there’s little chance that any child would fail to grow and develop and the required pace.
What’s more there’s a whole world of fun to be had with them too!
Filed under Educational Toys by on May 21st, 2011. Comment.