My Grandson is 41/2 and loves to use our iphone and Ipad to download games and plays them. What could I buy him for Christmas that would give him his own device to play games on.
I would caution against it only because I see kids turn into teens and they are addicted to video games. It's all they do! And setting limits, while possible, is a battle you have to be willing to fight.
My toddler loves the remote and phone! But I've decided that in our house we're not going to allow any video games or hand-held electronics to play on. Just be careful before you go that route...
My 5 year old has the LeapPad and loves it! It has a ton of educational items on it, you can get books that grow with them as far as the number of words and the difficulty of the words in the book increases as they get older. There are lots of games to buy, both educational and fun. And you can even get videos on it. I encourage my daughter to play on that instead of watching tv.
educational or nothing.
DO NOT fall into the trap of getting him something that does not teach anything. He's only going to be 5. If he's playing a video game he should also be learning something.
Go with a Leapster explorer , or the Leap pad 2.
The games are still fun but he will learn from them.
Tablet, an older phone when someone buys a new one, they can still access the market but not buy anything nor send messages or get phone calls since the phone does not have a phone number attached to it anymore, the number went to the new phone.
We started our girls out with a handed down Game Boy from their cousins, when they were 3 and 5 years old. It was a perfect intro without spending a fortune. They have now upgraded to Nintendo DS and love them and you will find a lot of games for them. However, as someone else pointed out those aren't usually educational.
I have heard a lot of good about the Leapsters, but we don't have one ourselves. They are pretty educational and fun.
We do have a Nook Color and you can dowload apps on to it to play. Our girls love that. A lot of the apps are educational and much cheaper than buying video games. You also have the added bonus of being able to use it for reading books and for that age, Barnes and Noble has a lot of "interactive" books as well. If we had to choose only one device at our house I think we would choose the Nook. It would probably be the most smilar to your Ipad without spending that much money.
His own iPod touch. Sounds silly but my kids have 2 other handheld gaming systems and my girls always go to our iPad and iPod as well. The games are too spendy for the handhld games and they miss the variety they have with the iPod.
I got my daughter a Nintendo DS when she was in the 1st grade. She LOVED it. She had a couple educational games and a couple fun games and my only "rule" was that she needed to do one-for-one.
You can also probably buy a refurbished ipod for him to use - or even a disabled iphone 3G - you can get those almost as cheaply as you can get the DS.... and then you guys can share games and you woudn't have to re-buy them.
