Sketcher Projector Jnr product reviews

My first thought upon opening the box was how flimsy it felt. The projector legs felt very flakey, and my worst fears were realised within five minutes - my two year old had snapped the leg off - luckily it clicked straight back on. My second thought was wow how cool would this be in a game of spotlight - looks like a big search and rescue light off a ship. I then realised that you needed 3AAA batteries and unfortunately did not have any so had to put it away.

The next day both girls reminded me I needed to make a very important purchase. That night both girls were so excited when I told them after brushing their teeth they were going to play with it. The on/off button is easy to find just sitting at the top. At first I could not find the drawing discs but eventually located stuck to the inside of the middle of the the box. They are so see through I lost one pretty much straight away and took a while looking for it.

My first attempt at drawing was not very successful. Through a lot of trial and error we learnt that you need to draw big and firm. It was not great on the ceiling and instead found using on the front door was the best place. Although, you had to be up really close was not fantastic from a great distance. The girls are loving this - every night is a race to see who can get ready for bed the fastest because they they have the choice of what pen they wish to use first. My eldest tries to design stuff where my baby scribbles to her hearts content and is so excited when she gets to place in the projector and see her art on display.

This really is simple to use. Draw and place in projector. The girls do not mind the quality of the projection as long as they can see it they are both happy. Cleaning the disc is so easy - just use some tissue with water and then dry and your ready to go again. You can adjust the projector to make it either large or small but find it just blurs it so easier to move backwards and forwards yourself.

I noted that its recommended for over 6 years of age I am not sure how much they would get out of it as the quality is not the best, but for my young ones its fantastic and they are loving it.

I was excited to try out a new product from Crayola we have been using crayola products for years and have always had lots of fun with all the different products. My 12 year old and 2 year old were both excited to try this out straight away I don't know what it is with kids and torches but they always seem to create a lot of excitement. This was no exception we have had a torch with projector disks before but with this you got to create your own images to project so that was even better.

There are 3 clear discs in total for creating your image and you can layer and have all three discs in the projector at once so you can create different effects. My kids took a disc each to start with, master 2 scribbled away and was quite happy while Miss 12 and I tried doing something a bit more intricate, this was actually quite hard as the discs are so small and the pens are so chunky. It would of been cool if the pens were a real fine point for older children to be able to do finer details as we found we couldn't do anywhere near the amount of detail shown on the box.

I also noted it said for ages 6 and up so children of this age would be more than able to use finer point pens and want to do more detailed images. I thought the 6 year age was quite a good guide age but my 2 year old got plenty of fun out of it he just needed to be supervised and his big sister was more than willing to help with this. One reason he needed to be supervised was he kept pulling the tripod arms of but luckily they snapped straight back on. The other reason was the discs are small and transparent so you drop them on the floor and you have a challenge finding them again!

For this reason I thought it might be a good idea to have a white border around the clear disc to make them easier to retrieve if you dropped them. The other thing I noted was that if you tilted to far when trying to move your images across the ceiling the discs fell out quite easily as they are quite thin and the slot is large so they are a very loose fit some sort of plastic locking system would be quite handy so once they are in they are locked in place until you are ready to change the disc again.

We played around with different pictures and used all the different colours, trying different walls and ceilings to project the images. We have a nice flat white ceiling in the lounge so this worked the best as on the slanted ceilings in the bedroom it was a bit more of a challenge as the images became elongated and out of shape. One thing we found was the blue pen worked the best and provided the most clear images whereas the orange pen images easily became fuzzy when you moved the distance to make the image larger. The closer you have the image to the ceiling the clearer the image is, so the kids played around with this to work out the best level.

My 2 year old has also been enjoying just using it as a torch, for this it is also great as it is very lightweight and child friendly with the big easy to find on/off switch. He has been enjoying taking it to bed and shining light about. We even had a game of shadow animals on the ceiling with our hands which was such a laugh so thanks to crayola, KIWIreviews and the tram at cave for giving us something the whole family has found some enjoyment in. I wouldn't say it is the perfect toy but it is pretty darn cool and my kids where impressed which is where the joy lies.

When I saw the Crayola Projection Jr. I knew it would be a hit with my kids (5.5 and 4 year old girls). They have a thing for torches and being able to make pictures with your torch would be so cool. I always wanted a bat signal torch when I was a child so now was my chance to create one. The teacher in me thought of all the wonderful things we could do with it. Miss 4 could identify the letters, numbers or shapes I had drawn. Miss 5.5 could use it for some much needed handwriting practice, after forming the letter five times correctly on paper and then she could write on the projection disc.

As I predicted this product was very popular and the children willingly played the games I created with them. In fact it was so popular I had to make more discs from aceate as the three provided were constantly getting miss-placed and were like searching for giant contact lenses (not an east task). Also the discs were cleaned with a damp paper towel but needed to be dried before reusing.

The other issue we had due to the popularity was they always wanted to play with it. The girls had lessons in sharing . I also learnt to check where the projector was before they went to bed each night otherwise there would be very tired children the next day. I was grateful we received our projector in winter as it is best on a dark evening so for our children it won't get much use during the long summer days.

We found the discs very easy to draw on both with the three markers provided and other dry erase markers we had around the house. Once I had raided the remote controls and installed the batteries it was very easy for the children to operate. The on/off button is very sensitive and I turned it on a few times when packing it away in the box. The projection wasn't very clear but this didn't stop the children's enjoyment. We tried projecting in onto the ceiling and walls but found our chocolate coloured curtains worked the best.

I would consider picking one of these up on special as a gift so I am sure any child from 4 through to 10 would get hours of enjoyment from it but be warned the children like to turn off the lights (which is annoying while you are trying to get chores done) so they came see their creations.