Aimed at 7-11 year olds, The Comic Club offers children a chance to read a couple of fun but educational magazines each month, delivered straight to their door along with an activity sheet encompassing fun things to do from both magazines. They can either read them alone or great to read as a family discovering things you didn’t know whether that be about wild species of animals or the latest environmental and eco news. There are even fun recipes to bake and we found some delicious gooey brownies to make in one of this months magazines.
We received a National Geographic Kids and Brilliant Brainz magazines along with the activity sheet from The Comic Club. Each child friendly activity refers you to the page in the relevant magazine to refresh your memory and give you some inspiration for things such as writing a short story, drawing ideas for things or for those who love a bit of Maths, how about practicing multiplying up the brownie recipe found in the Brilliant Brainz magazine? My boy enjoyed putting his logical head on for this one but equally used his imagination in his short story about an animal.
The magazines are both packed full of interesting content that both my boy and I enjoyed reading through. The National Geographic Kids issue featured several pages about wild cats and as soon as we came across Ocelots, my boy said “I know what they are”, “really?” I replied, “yes he said, I have them in Minecraft!”. Well I never knew he’d of even heard of one but there you go, although it was great to read more about them although sad to see that their population is decreasing due to habitat loss. I thought the Real or Fake article was interesting and my boy surprised me with how much he new about all things eco when we read the pages that covered green issues. They clearly are drumming recycling, reusing and beach cleaning etc into them at school these days.
The Brilliant Brainz magazine isn’t one we’d come across before but it has plenty of things to do and think about inside it. The ‘Mind Blowing Brownies’ are on our list of bakes to make! This magazine covers a wide range of topics such as music, science, art, health and the environment so all good subjects for children to be reading and learning about. Most pages include activities to do whether it’s just thinking about something, telling jokes, making something crafty, trying an experiment etc so there is a lot to keep kids occupied.
Overall I think The Comic Club is a great idea and the fact that they are delivered to your door, saves you walking down the supermarket aisles with your kids allowing them to view the realm of kids magazines covered in plastic tat toys with little content inside. By having a subscription also means they have something to look forward to each month from the postman.
Why not check out The Comic Club where you’ll find details of how to subscribe along with a free online Kids Zone with fun facts and activities that they can access at any time!
All reviews are my own and my family’s opinions. We are not paid for reviews although we do receive the product to try out and enable us to write the review.
Next we checked out some of the honey products, one of which was the Honey I Washed The Kids soap, a delectable caramel smelling soap with a rich creamy lather. Both the children and I love using this in the bath and a chunk actually lasts a good while. Also containing honey is the It’s Raining Men shower gel which has a creamy consistency and sweet smell suitable for all the family.
The Great Baking Set contains all the basic equipment needed to make some mini cupcakes. You get a couple of bowls, one with a suction base to help it stick to the worktop, a 4 hole silicone baking tray, spoon measurers, an egg cracker, cake cases, icing nozzle and bags.
Mister B being younger has not had much experience in cracking eggs so was keen to try the egg cracker. I think this is great for really young ones as it ensures a clean break with no eggshell to remove. Miss M being older and already used to breaking an egg prefered to do it on the side of the bowl as usual.
They then added some flour and cocoa powder before filling the cake cases as well as the cake pop and donut moulds from the Cake Pops set. 
The donut style moulds looked great when the cakes where turned out and the children really loved these as they looked different and fun. Miss M was then eager to have a go with the piping bag, so she mixed up some butter and icing sugar, then added a bit of blue colouring to make her icing. She found the icing bag easy to squeeze out of and the nozzle was a good size for icing her cakes. 
We then moved on to complete our cake pops. The set contains cake pop moulds along with the donut shaped moulds, some chocolate cone shaped moulds and sticks.
We’d already made the cake pop ball shapes along with our cakes above, so the next step was to pour some melted 
Overall we’ve had fun with the children’s Real Baking kits and the kids have been inspired to want to bake even more. They’ve had a go at different techniques and created various things and it’s great to get them involved in the kitchen although I have to say my two are always keen when it comes to making something food orientated. 
The tiles come in a simple zip up banana shaped bag. This is really useful and keeps all the pieces together for storage. It also opens nice and widely so that it’s easy for little fingers to help tidy away at the end of play.
The Bananagrams set comprises of 80 high quality single tiles and 13 combination tiles. There are brightly coloured and differently coloured to help younger children recognise their letters. Therefore letters such as p’s, b’s and d’s will always be different colours. The letters are all small letters which are what preschool children learn to recognise first and the tiles also have a small line at the bottom to identify which way up the tile should go. Vowels are also easily seen by being coloured yellow.
Both my children aged 5 and 8 were eager to have a play and we started with some simple letter recognition ideas that we found on the instruction sheet such as finding the letters in your name, finding each letter of the alphabet and making small little rhyming words such as cat and mat. We then had a go at the main game, although gave Mister B some assistance being the youngest. He was really good at finding words, he just needed a little help to link them together.
The game is a race to use up all your letters and you can have unlimited swaps from the centre. It is fast paced and fun and get’s everyone excited and competitive during play. Of course you can slow things down for younger players and even help them to maintain their motivation to play with letters.
