Great mess free fun for the whole family
We ordered the Smarkids Aqua Magic Doodle Mat for our 18-month-old, I know the recommended age is from. 3 years but he loves messy play and we thought this was a great way for him to still have fun but without the mess. Upon receiving the mat, the packaging seemed nice and once I opened it all of the parts came nicely packed away within the backpack, I thought this was a really nice touch and shows that everything can easily and nicely fit into the pack for storage and transport.
The mat was bigger than I originally expected and I was surprised quite how many bits pieces came with it, I’ve included a photo of the mat with a one-pound coin on top for scale, you can see how tiny it is in comparison. Also, I’ve attached an image of all of the included tools on top of the mat. The set also nicely comes with a book with ‘relatively simple’ instructions on how to draw some quite complex animals and objects, I’ve added an image of the instructions on how to draw a stegosaurus, I thought this was a good example, so a quite difficult with large jumps between steps, but the stegosaurus is fairly basic.
Once we started planning with the mat it was great fun for both our little man and us too! He can hold the pens and although he cannot draw anything with intention he loves to draw and make patterns, I have included a short video with clips of him having fun with the set, my personal favourite part of the video is where he runs the pen off the end of the mat onto the carpet and there is no mess made on the carpet, it isn’t even wet, I can only imagine the trouble we both would have been in with mummy if that was paint. He also loved the stamps, he really liked pushing down very hard on them to reveal the pattern.
Once finished with playtime it quickly and easily all packs up into the backpack which was great. My only two issues I’ve found is that the stencils don’t really work as the water runs meaning the colour bleeds and the character is unrecognisable. The other issue is that after only one play session he has managed to pull off the rubber part of the roller and rip it also he started trying to eat the foam for the stamp well, I know this isn’t really the fault of the mat, and therefore I am not marking it down as a result, but maybe if the foam was stuck to the well and the rubber was stuck to the roller then it would not have been an issue.
Smarkids Aqua Magic Doodle Mat Gallery
Smarkids Aqua Magic Doodle Mat
£19.99
Pros
- Large enough for everyone to play
- Mess-free
- Fun tools
- The backpack is so useful
Cons
- A few design tweaks would help make it usable for longer by smaller children
