shape

Shape
$22.50
Also bought the wooden puzzle from goodman directly, expensive to ship to US but more than worth it. Used paypal to pay for the puzzle, arrived promptly.
23 month old loves to play with the book and puzzle

Melissa & Doug Shape Sorting Cube
$14.99
Our boy just had his first birthday party and one of the gifts he received was a Melissa and Doug Shape Sorting Cube. The manufacturer says it's for children of 2 and up, so I guess the gift is a bit ahead of the game. That's OK. Right now, our boy uses the little blocks for bashing on things and for chewing on. The top also gets a certain amount of chewing around the corners.

In any case, it's a nice wooden toy, in contrast to many of his other plastic toys and almost all seem to be Made in China. I cringe at the brightly painted pieces and hope that the paint is safe. So many things from China turn out to be tainted, these days. I guess this Shape Sorting Cube is educational in that it can be used to learn shapes and colors and help in counting and reasoning skills. Well, so be it. Will the kid enjoy it as a toy? Who Knows? We'll just have to wait beyond the bashing and chewing stages. Would I have enjoyed it and found it a good learning experience? Probably marginal, at best. So how shall I rate it? I'll give it four stars. My feeling is three, but it hasn't been tested by the boy as yet and my hopes are he would rate it a five.

Gary Peterson

ThinkFun Shape By Shape
$14.99
I can't get enough of the fun games from Thinkfun. We've yet to buy a dud. Shape by shape is a 2-dimensional puzzle game, similar to tangrams. Some pieces are red, some are yellow and you make a design to match one from a deck of picture cards. It's a red design against a yellow background. The shapes repeat themselves so while there are 14 pieces there are only 7 different shapes. That helps the player see patterns in solving each puzzle. At first, players might need the picture clues on the back of each card. Two clues are given; first the layout of JUST the red tiles are given. Hopefully once those are in place the player can figure out how to place the yellow. But if not, the second picture clue gives the layout of the yellow tiles. When my middle child, then age 7 first played, she strictly just followed the clues, trying to match the tiles to the pictures. Not so challenging to an adult perhaps but perfect for her at that time. After playing a while though you'll start to get the hang of the game, be able to tell right away if two pieces can't possibly go next to each other, and so on.

My only gripe about this game is it's storage design. The cards store inside the game frame; a good idea but "played with" cards tend to "fluff up" a bit and tend to make the sliding drawer get stuck.

Shape: Ultimate Bikini Body Workout
$14.98
I usually love the DVDs from Shape, but I was really disappointed with this one. The workouts - both the cardio segments and toning segments - are fairly effective for an intermediate exerciser (although not great), but I found it very difficult to stay motivated to get all the way through the segments because of the instructor. She doesn't cue well or work both sides of the body evenly, and unfortunately her words of encouragement got on my nerves rather than got me to work harder. She also says those words of encouragement at weird times when I don't really need it and when she could be talking about something more helpful like form and technique. This is the first time I've ever found a Shape product to be less than satisfactory, but I thought that this DVD was not up to the standards of the others, and the annoying instruction overrode any of the benefits of the workouts themselves.