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Posted by Satori, age 6

I want to talk about Pocket Frogs.

“At the Pond”

You level up, and earn more interesting frog kinds. Sometimes you win awards, new frogs, and prizes! You can earn money, breed, buy stuff, and unlock frogs as you level! Potions are very good.

Frogs must be in nursury or other habitats.

I’m almost at level 4!

You can also do puzzles and races!

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1. Stack the States and Stack the Countries Last month I was specifically looking for state geography iPad...

Satori shouts out HI to Gramy and Grampy! (I wanted to add some some of personal post with photos of their granddaughter to offset all the boring curriculum reviews I do.)

Those pictures were taken late last night. This afternoon she started working on it again after we got back from the movies.

I think she’ll have this puzzle finished this weekend already. I was kinda hoping it would last a week or so. We went to the toystore today and there are no whimsical 500-piece puzzles with fairies or at least appealing, colorful images for young children. I did find a Ravensburger Curious Kitties one on Amazon that will arrive next week.

I also can’t keep up with enough writing journals and bare books for her! She freaked out this past week until our latest Rainbow Resource shipment arrived this afternoon with 20 more blank books. She had a list of a dozen stories she wanted to get down on paper.

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It quizzes you on capitals, states, nicknames, abbreviations, bordering states, and more. You select the state answer and then you position your state to fall and stack up below the b&w line.

The states will tumble, bounce, and finally settle, hopefully on the platform. If you’re not careful, a state will fall right off. What’s cool is that you can plan how your state will fall so it will best stick. Even better, is you see the relative sizes of the states. I happen to have a lot of big states here, but the sizes are very apparent when you have some of the smaller northeastern states paired up with a state like Alaska and Texas. It’s so funny as the states look at each other with their huge eyes.

Once your stack of states goes over the line, you win that session. You then earn a new state to add to your map.

After you earn a certain amount of states, you are able to play more games. Here’s the bonus Puzzler Game. The states bounce off each other if you hit them, so you have to keep that in mind and carefully position each state in place.

A week later, Stack the Countries was released on 2/24/2011!  This is $1.99, but of course, you’re learning the entire world, so very worth it. A game on the world world can be daunting, especially for a 6 year old, so you can start out on “Learn” mode for a continent.

Clicking on a country brings up the basics, you’ll see the country shape, name, flag, and capital.

Click View Flash Card to learn even more.

When you’re ready to play, you can control which types of questions are presented…

Now you’re set to play!

Just like in Stack the States, you earn countries to unlock more bonus games. It reinforces the position of a country, as well as making the game totally addicting.

Check out this YouTube to experience Stack the Countries:

These two iPad apps are our absolute favorites and by far the best value. Our entire family plays these games, and we also literally have a “blast” with Rocket Math, another great educational app by the same person who made Stack the States. I’ll blog about that in another post.

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The object is to get the ice cream truck out of the traffic grid. Cars can only move back and forth.

The one disadvantage is that these vehicles are very light plastic and can easily pop off their tracks. But once we paid heed to this and were careful, they stayed on their tracks better.

Daddy and Satori had a great time playing the game. I think the normal version of Rush Hour (get the Standard, not Deluxe version) will find its way into our house very soon!

And in the photo below – pop! The Ice Cream Truck sails away free!

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Sure enough, it was perfect for Satori! And mom and dad too! We all loved putting this puzzle together. I was not allowed to touch the puzzle (Satori’s orders), but we talked our way through it.

For our first time putting the puzzle together, the puzzle cover came in handy. After Satori finished the edges and the water areas, it was time to tackle the countries. Each piece is shaped like that individual country, colored brightly and most are sized generously (very tiny countries were grouped with another country). So it was easy to  start with one big country and work our way around the continent. All I would do was call out the name of the next country and Satori would zero in on it, repeating the country name after me. Great initial exposure to the country names!

Here’s Satori putting in the very last piece of the puzzle. This is a puzzle we’ll do dozens of times for sure, learning more each time.

This was such a hit, I’ll get the rest of the series as we get to those parts of the world in our  history program: GeoPuzzles U.S. and Canada, Europe, Asia (covers Australia), and Latin America.

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It’s just the perfect size for puzzles and games for  Satori.

If you know me, I get obsessed about certain things and go all out researching and gathering… Well one of my latest obsessions is games! Before Christmas the only games we had were like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. Ho-hum… Needless to say, we never played the boring games. A thread on the WTM got me excited about building our game library!

I scoured homeschooling forums and of course Amazon, and came up with some that I think Satori will enjoy. I looked for challenging games for ages 5-7 that were creative and fun. Probably equally important, ones that her mom and dad would enjoy playing with her!

Cleaning out our hall closet was a project that took me almost two weeks, but finally it is cleared out and our new games and puzzles moved in. Even Daddy and Mama got a few – our favorite is now Pandemic, a cooperative game that is sooo much fun! We look forward to playing Ticket to Ride Europe this weekend. David chose that game, there is also Ticket to Ride based in North America. There’s a whole world of games like this that we can’t wait to play. These are over Satori’s level, but in a few years she’ll be able to join us.

I hope to review some of the games that Satori and our family enjoy. Right now we’re digging Chicken Cha Cha Cha and Kids of Carcassonne. I’ll talk more about them in-depth in another post.

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