I’ve recently been on a hunt to find a good STEM-related magazine for my young children (aged 3 and 5). I’m not keen on the plastic toys that come attached to the front of many children’s magazines and I wanted something that was both entertaining and had some educational value. On my search I stumbled across Okido, branded as an Arts and Science Magazine for Kids, aimed at children aged 3 to 7. I reached out to the team and they kindly sent me a free copy to review. This has not been a quick process as the magazine is so jam-packed with content, myself and young children have been regularly revisiting the various sections since we received our copy a few weeks ago. We have issue #98, titled Friends which is themed around friendship and returning to school.
The magazine is 47 pages long and made from thick matt paper which, in addition to being environmentally friendly, is particularly useful for colouring and writing on the activity pages; too often magazines have a sheen to them meaning pencils don’t show up well and pens rub straight off! Another little feature which I like is that pages with cut-out sections have nothing on the back to ruin so you can freely cut out the activities without losing valuable magazine content. Additionally with the pages being printed on good-quality, thick paper, the cut-out activities stand up well to the handling of small children! In fact our chatterbox and puppets are still in pretty good condition weeks later!
Overall, I was very impressed with the content; there was a large variety of things to read and do, including comic strips, stories and a poem. All of which were enjoyed by both boys. They also really enjoyed all of the activities to complete, these involved drawing, writing, navigating a maze and maths challenges. They both particularly liked the search and find pictures too, one involved finding and colouring monsters and the other was more like a Where’s Wally exercise to find Foxy and friends as well as a variety of other quirky characters within the picture. To my surprise my three-year-old also really enjoyed the writing exercise showing lots of concentration to trace over all of the words.
My three-year-old also loved the addition of the Pizza Swirls recipe, which was very accessible and simple for young children (as well as being delicious and perfect for our guests during an afternoon playdate!) I believe there is a recipe featured in each magazine so I’m quite intrigued to see what will be in our next edition.
The board game was a nice feature too; we all enjoyed playing it and using a variety of different objects as counters! I think the 1990s Mini-Boglins and Monsters-in-my-Pocket were our favourites!
Amongst the other content, my oldest son particularly enjoyed making stick puppets which were based around school children, he liked equipping their bags with various pieces of school stationery and writing in their miniature exercise books.
The only drawback for me was that the issue I was reviewing didn’t have a lot of content in relation to the science and technology aspect of STEM learning but having looked through the back-catalogue on their website it seems that’s unusual so I wasn’t put-off by this, in fact I will be subscribing shortly and looking forward to receiving our next issue.
If you would like to subscribe too you can enjoy 15% off using the code: SOCIAL15. Click here to order online directly from the Okido website.