Comments (6)

By Mom Unplugged, August 14, 2009 7:33 pm

So you don’t think a four piece puzzle could ever present a challenge? Then you have obviously never played Safari Undercover by Educational Insights.

A recent happy find before our last big trip, Safari Undercover is a wonderful logic game! The goal of the game is simple: use the four differently shaped pieces to mask out certain wild animals while leaving others exposed according to the challenges illustrated in the booklet.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? The challenges are organized from “Starter” to “Master” and most of them really require a lot of thought, even for an adult!

The “Starter” level has hints to get you started if you need them. After that you are on your own. Each puzzle has only one answer and the solutions are included in the booklet.

What I like best about the game is that it has only four fairly large pieces and a booklet (not much to lose). The pieces and booklet store neatly in a drawer under the game’s top. Perfect for travel.

We played it for hours on the airplane and I was as eager for a turn as my kids were!

The game is also available with pirates.

The recommended age is 7 to 9 years, but I say 7 to 99 years!

PS: This is not a paid review (none of my reviews ever are). I am simply sharing my thoughts about a game that I bought myself and like.

Comments (2)

By Mom Unplugged, August 12, 2009 9:58 pm

Oh my, does that title sound totally self-absorbed, or what?? How embarrassing!

The thing is though, I get a surprising number of questions about Unplug Your Kids, so I decided that it might be a good idea to rewrite my two year-old brief and simple “About” page.

The result is an “Interview With Myself” page which (hopefully) answers some of the most frequent questions I receive.

Here is the link, if anyone is interested.

• An Interview With Myself

If you are not interested, that’s OK!

Comments (12)

By Mom Unplugged, August 9, 2009 9:39 pm

We’re back from France and finally over the jet lag. Time for the weekly Unplugged Project to resume!

The theme for this week’s Unplugged Project is photograph so we came up with a super-easy photo project using some of the many photos from our trip.

Inspired by a very old, hand-colored black and white photograph of my mother as a child, I thought it might be fun to turn some of our trip photos into old-fashioned, or maybe even funky-looking colored pictures.

First we each chose a few favorite trip photographs to play with. Since our pictures were all digital, it was easy to transform them into black and white using my photo editor (not exactly “unplugged,” but this is just the first step).

After experimenting a bit, I found that for darker pictures, or those with many dark colors, the result was improved by lightening the exposure slightly (any simple photo editor can do this also).

TIP: Before altering with your photos with the editor, make a duplicate of your photo and use that. You don’t want to permanently change your one and only copy of that favorite picture!

We printed the new black and white pictures onto plain white document paper. Regular paper is easier to color on than photo paper, and even if the picture appears a bit grainier on ordinary paper, that simply adds to the old/artsy effect.

Wait for the ink to dry completely before moving on to the next step. This might take a little while if the picture has lots of dark bits.

When everything is dry, you can start coloring. We used colored pencils since they allow the picture to show through the color.

• You can try to reproduce the real colors (more or less - of course the cat wasn’t really yellow!), such as here:

• Or have fun and do crazy colors for more of a modern art look:

• Experiment with pressing hard, or lightly.

• Keep the colors in the same family, or vary them.

• Try coloring some areas and leaving others black and white.

Whatever you decide to do, the effect is really beautiful, almost luminescent sometimes!

The children and I found this fun and easy, even my 3 year-old. She wanted to color a baby picture of herself. I love that green hair:

Use your pictures for a scrapbook or album, frame them, or make a collage out of them. You could even turn them into cards or family gifts.

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If you joined in this week’s Unplugged Project with your own photograph project, then please put a link to your project post (not just your blog) in Mr. Linky below. Please leave a link in a comment too since Mr. Linky has been having problems lately. If you didn’t do a photograph project, then please don’t link, but read more about how to join in here. We’d love to have you!

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The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project will be:

Pocket

Have fun!

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Comments (2)

By Mom Unplugged, August 4, 2009 6:05 pm

Nothing is more fun for children (and me) than a real labyrinth!!