Parents these days have two kinds of aims for their children – they want them to play well and be healthy and happy; and they want them to slave away at their education as well. With parents getting more obsessed over their children's school performance than ever before, educational play is where all attention is focused these days. Perhaps these educational toys for children will help.
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 Zanzoon Animap Interactive Talking Map  US $4.75
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 ANIMAP INTERACTIVE TALKING ANIMALS OF THE WORLD MAP US $45.99
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The Animap Interactive Talking Map is one of the most perfectly conceived educational toys for children, ever. This $20 toy is a large spread-out map of the world with lots of animals marked out over different parts of the world. Your child needs to touch an animal anywhere in the world, and right away, a happy voice tells your child what the animal sounds like and it comes up with a few fun facts as well. Pretty soon, you'll find that your child knows the difference between the call of a bull and a bison, a horse and a zebra.
The $100 Radica Mindflex Duel is a high-tech-looking toy. It uses sensors to try to measure each player’s brain waves. The more each kid concentrates, the stronger do the brain waves become. And the stronger those brain waves become, the farther along a track the toy takes a ball. It turns into a kind of super-hero-like mind game – using your brain waves to actually set something in motion. It's quite an addictive, even brilliant toy.
The LEGO Master Builder Academy Space Designer kit is a more traditional kind of toy. But it can be pretty great in the way it teaches a child to imagine something and to build it with regular building techniques. The Leapfrog Tag Reading System is something most people are familiar with; but it's still one of the best educational toys for children after all these years. Basically, it's a big fat pen with a speaker and a scanner inside.
You have to buy specially-designed Leapfrog books to go with the pen. Every time your child drags the pen across something in the book, the built-in speaker reads it aloud and even puts out special effects.
For really little kids – two-year-olds and up – the see-yourself camera by Fisher-Price is an innovative thing because it comes with a swivel lens. It spins around so that a child can see herself as she takes a picture. And it isn't some toy either. It takes video, has a 1.8 inch screen and has plenty of memory.
