Avalanche Fruit Stand Game Review + Giveaway (Closed)

I don’t know about you, but I find it a great challenge to find educational games that entertain my son that don’t bore me to tears. I think a lot of moms can probably relate – it’s hard to get a 3 year old to sit still and truly engage in a task or game fore very long. Especially if he thinks it involves some sort of “lesson” – nothing sends him running faster. I’m always looking for games and activities to do at home that are an effective blend of fun and learning and Learning Resources is a wealth of options for educational toys and games for classrooms – and the home.

The Learning Resources Mission

Since its founding in 1984, Learning Resources’ continues to be guided by its mission to develop quality educational products that make learning exciting for children of all ages and abilities. The Company strives to create hands-on products that build a concrete foundation of skills through exploration, imagination and fun. Its steadfast adherence to this mission is evidenced by hundreds of award-winning products and the thousands of children, teachers and parents who enjoy them.

Avalanche Fruit Stand Game

We’ve had the pleasure of playing with a couple games from Learning Resources. The first I’m going to introduce is Avalanche Fruit Stand. Here’s the game description:

Are you steady enough to work at this fun fruit stand? Spin the wheel, then use the jumbo tweezers to pick or place fruit.

• Develops fine motor skills, especially the all–important pincer grasp that prepares children for handwriting
• Reinforces color and fruit vocabulary
• Perfect for teachers, specialists and occupational therapists
• Includes 40 fruit counters (5 different fruits), 2 jumbo tweezers, picture spinner, and adjustable cardboard fruit stand/storage box measuring 6″L x 9.5″W x 13.75″H

Develop Fine Motor Skills

My son can recognize every letter, but when it comes to trying to write them it’s an entirely different story. Now, this is a big generalization on my part, but I find that my son’s fine motor skills are behind many of his girl classmates. I really think this is one area where boys are a little behind their preschool girl friends. Basically, that’s a round-a-bout way of saying I was excited about this game as soon as I saw that it was good for helping to develop fine motor skills. The major task of the game is to use the pincer grasp to clamp tongs around small pieces of fruit. It was really easy to teach my son the correct way to hold the tongs because there are indented areas for his fingers. To my surprise, he picked it up and was good at using them the very first time we played the game.

Learning Sportsmanship

So it turns out my son is not the best sport. Often when we play a game he as a total meltdown when he loses. The first time we played the game, we ran into this problem a few times because the rules say that when you remove a piece of fruit, if you make other fruit fall you have to put all yours back in the stand and start from nothing. Based on his reaction (not good!), I let him take the lead and make his own rules the first couple times we played so he didn’t have to start from scratch every time he caused an “avalanche”.

It’s so fun to see his little brain working when we play. For example, when you spin the wheel one option is to land on a number and then pick any 2 or 3 pieces of fruit of your choice. My son? He insists you have to pick the same fruit. So rather than take a strawberry and banana and apple to get himself closer to a complete collection of all five fruits, he’ll pick 3 bananas. Oh well, so he doesn’t have the killer instinct to win. We still have a great time playing the game.

To Buy or Not to Buy

To Buy… Avalanche Fruit Stand game from Learning Resources is a great way to play and learn with your pre-K kid. It’s been great at improving my 3 year old’s fine motor skills. From start to finish, the game doesn’t take too long to complete and the concept is super simple and fun. As your child’s skills improve, you can change the angle of the Fruit Stand to make the challenge of removing fruit more difficult.

Or Not to Buy… My only improvement is to change the design of the spinner. It involves a small inner circle to which the actual spinning pointer attaches but it is separate from the spinner itself.

Shop! The Avalanche Fruit Stand game from Learning Resources is only $18.99. Both Parents and Teachers can browse educational toys from subject, category and theme.

Win! The Avalanche Fruit Stand Game!

How to Enter: Visit Learning Resources and leave a comment with another educational activity you’d love to play with your child.

Bonus Entries - Valid only after completing first mandatory entry. Please leave a separate comment for each you do.

* Follow Learning Resources on Twitter
* Like Learning Resources on Facebook
* Follow The Shopping Mama on Twitter and tweet this giveaway. You may do this every day, just leave the link when you do.
Win an educational game that’s actually fun! The Avalanche Fruit Stand game from Learning Resources @TheShoppingMama http://bit.ly/dhKFxE
* Fan The Shopping Mama on Facebook
* Be a Shopping Buddy, aka, follow in Google Friends Connect
* Subscribe to The Shopping Mama in email or RSS
* Blog about this giveaway including a link to this post – leave 5 comments with your link

Disclosure: Giveaway ends June 7. Open to US mailing addresses only. Thanks to Learning Resources for providing a sample product for the purpose of this review and the giveaway prizes. Opinions here are my own and uninfluenced by receipt of product.