Tag! Your it!*

Toy: LeapFrog Tag

Retailer: On-line and any major toy store

Web Link: http://www.leapfrogshop.co.uk/

Price: £39.99

Score out of 5: 5

For Squidge’s birth­day her god­mother asked me what she wanted for a pressie.  At first I wasn’t sure what exactly but I knew some­thing from Leapfrog would be nice.  I did a bit of research on line and found that they had grad­u­ated from the “pad” w/ the pen attached (although they still have those) to some­thing called a Tag.  Intrigued I headed over to the local toy store and had a nice play with them. They have a tod­dler ver­sion TAG Junior as well as the the orig­i­nal TAG.  She got the orig­i­nal Tag because I thought she could grow into it as opposed to the junior (which she would out grow too quickly).  I’m bad about buy­ing things just a smidge too big for her and let­ting her grow into it.  The LeapFrog Tag reader is com­pact and easy to use. The sys­tem comes w/ the reader pen, CD, USB cord for down­loads and the Ozzie and Mack sto­ry­book.  It does require bat­ter­ies so don’t for­get those!   The ini­tial set up was fairly pain­less– just load the cd on your com­puter and fol­low the instruc­tions.  After set­ting up an account I just down­loaded the sto­ries we had and we were off to the races.

Although Squidge is only 3 (and the rec­om­mended age for the Tag reader is 4+) she was able to grasp the con­cept pretty quickly.  Squidge loves books so the abil­ity for her to make the book ‘talk’ was fas­ci­nat­ing for her.  As with most LeapFrog sto­ry­books you can click a pic­ture and it will read the story for you but Squidge was more inter­ested in click­ing on the pic­tures and have them say some­thing.  Squidge is also fas­ci­nated by the alpha­bet at the moment so it was great that the first Tag sto­ry­book had a few pages in the back w/ the alpha­bet and some key words.  Play­ing with the Tag and ‘read­ing’ the last few pages is one of her favorite things to do.  If you have a book mad kid this is a fan­tas­tic thing to have.  I espe­cially love that it will enter­tain her for a while so I can sit back and have a cup of tea and a lit­tle peace and quiet.  It’s com­pact­ness is a major plus for me.  I just grab a cou­ple of books and the pen, throw it in your hand­bag and off we go.  I also pur­chased some head­phones and she was able to lis­ten w/ both­er­ing any­one or being both­ered. At £40 the sys­tem isn’t cheap but I think it’s well worth the price  We also took this on our trip to the USA and it was a god­send.  We just plugged in the head­phones and she was occu­pied for a while.  Any­one who has been on a transat­lantic flight w/ a tod­dlers knows the impor­tance of a toy that will dis­cract the child for good chucks of the flight.

If there is any­thing I’m not impressed with is the mem­ory space.  We have Ozzie and Mack, National Geo­graphic ani­mal flash cards, The Cat in the Hat, Wal­ter the fart­ing dog and Olivia– so 5 books and it’s full.  If we want to down­load any more books we need to delete some­thing.  I bit incon­ve­nient espe­cially if your kid is like mine and will almost cer­tainly want the book you deleted as soon as it’s  been deleted!!

* This review was not paid for by any com­pany– I did not receive free mer­chan­dise nor did they give me money.  If free mer­chan­dise was to arrive on my doorstep by a kindly DHL man I would not turn him away. The same could be said for cash.  I did sub­mit this review to a fab new UK toy review web­site Great Toy Guide . In the next few weeks you will prob­a­bly see more reviews for GTG by me here and on the web­site.  I am beyond thrilled to be par­tic­i­pat­ing in a UK based toy review site.  I feel that although a lot of the toys can be pur­chased in the US it is nice to have one that is UK based and from what I can see some of the toys will/are by small toy com­pa­nies so YAY for independent/ organic/green toy companies.