My 4year old Grandson LOVES this!!! He was so excited when I gave this to him! He was able to read everything and follow the designs. He reads very well at higher grade levels and I needed something challenging and still fun for him. He figured it all out immediately. It is a lot of fun!!! Worth the money for me!
Bought for my preschool. Not as sturdy as I was hoping, but I think they'll be ok. I do have a toddler running around and I have to make sure she doesn't get to the pieces, but the four year olds have been ok using them. You do need a pretty big magnetic space to use them. I have a large white board and I'm glad it isn't mounted on the wall yet because some of the cards required turning it portrait instead of landscape.
So creative and taps their creativity. Don't care for how small the marbles are and we're still looking for a better option than on our regrigerator. They have managed to misplace all 4 marbles within the first week (they are small and likely rolled under appliances) but have found other round objects to use in their place. A little pricey for what you get, but they will use it a lot for awhile, so that justified our purchase of this creative "toy."
This is a pretty great toy set. It’s imaginative and fun as well as inventive. All our kids ages 2-7 like playing with it. They love to race the marbles down the tracks and will do so for a long time.
It comes with a set of laminated cards you can use for inspiration. Our youngest liked these a lot and I was surprised how well they could follow the card to make a track. It made it a toy they could use without me!! Though we use it a great deal together.
The pieces are light but sturdy made of foam and have taken significant use and are holding up well. Since we use them on a chalk board they have been cleaned a bit too and they still look great after being covered in colored chalk. The magnets are strong and the pieces hold well, but not ridiculously so. Making rearranging or removing easy.
The marbles that come with it are a bit lighter than the standard run of the mill kind so work best with the set. But regular ones work well too (since we seem to lose the given ones from time to time). It’s when you build a track that gets going fast and the force of the stop makes the basket piece fall off. But who can get mad at that? The tracks can go pretty fast.
Man, did I strike gold this Christmas in great toys for the three-yr old granddaughter. Learning Resources again, and this set is great. We used to have to make our own marble 'tracks' when I was a kid, out of shirt cardboards, gift boxes, whatever we could find plus a lot of Scotch tape. My own kids had Swedish wooden sets that were wonderful, but not so wonderful on today's wood floors, I'm guessing. Enter foam tracks with magnetic backs that you can set up on any vertical steel surface, like the fridge, filing cabinets and entry doors. Or you can buy one of those magnetic boards if you want this kept in their bedroom. Non-scratch, bright colors, and the little tyke learns a few things while having some fun. They grow so darn fast I don't like to spend a lot of money on toys at this level, and Learning Resources has some quality toys at very reasonable prices. I have a second set in my queue to enlarge the options of this one.
I'm just a grandma who is so tired of all the junk out there - for all ages, including me. It's a real challenge to find good toys that are made well, allow the kids to use their imaginations in playing with them, that they can play with others, and don't cost an arm and a leg. Every toy I've purchased from LR so far has been perfect, and best of all, used over and over again. Later when I think she's outgrown them she'll make up a new way to play with them, which is where the real learning comes in play in the early years.