Friday, December 17, 2010

TOS Review/ Tiny Planets

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Tiny planets is an online adventure set in space, that will keep your kids entertained for hours.


There are 6 different planets that your children can explore.

1. My Tiny Planets: Here is where your planet is located. On your planet you can add plants, different atmospheres, different surfaces, etc, that you purchase from the Terra Mart.

You earn the money by flying around in Central Space and shooting stars and other objects, and by playing games.

Bing and Bong also live in Central Space, and you can visit them on their planet if they are home, but they have never been home when my children have tried to visit, so I am not really sure what you actually do here.

Bing and Bong are the main characters of Tiny Planets. 

A black hole will take you to the neighborhood where your planet is located , and here you can see other cadets planets, if you have added them to your friends list.

You can add friends and talk to each other, but it is through already written prompts, so you do not have to worry about inappropriate things being said to your children. 

In Central Space you can see other cadets flying around, and you can add them to your friends list.


2. Tiny Planets Lab: Here is where Bing's Corner is. This is my children's favorite spot on Tiny Planets.
 This is basically a planet full of arcade type games.

You earn stars, which is your money, by playing these games as well.


3. Tiny Planets Books: Here you will find interactive story books featuring Bing and Bong.

There are only 2 free books here, but you can purchase the others with Keys, which you would have to purchase for your child.

You can purchase keys for:

10 keys for $1.95
25 keys for $3.95
85 keys for $9.95
250 keys for $25.95
600  key for $49.95

You use these keys for purchasing books, videos, and other items at the Terra Mart. Tiny Planets is free of charge, unless you would like to purchase keys for some of the additional items.

Tiny Planets is free of charge, unless you would like to purchase keys for some of the additional items.


It is not nessessary to purchase the keys, but your children may like to have some so that their play may be enhanced.



4. Tiny Planets T.V.: This video series was co-created with Sesame Workshop and emphasizes science education and early learning goals.

There is one free video here, and the others can be purchased with Keys.

Once you purchase an item, you have it forever.



5.Tiny Planets Fun: This is basically more T.V., and another way to Bing's and Bong's corners.



6. Tiny Planets Learning: Here your younger child can learn his letters and numbers, and learn a few new activities. You print these worksheets off for your child.



I let my kids, 13 and 6, try this out for a couple of weeks to really get a full understanding of how it worked before I really sat down to play it!

This way they already knew what to do, and could just show me.

At first, they did not like it at all.

They thought it was really boring, and that there was not much to do.

I told them to keep at it, and really explore every part and see what they could find, and after a while of exploring they found that it really did have a lot more than they had originally thought.

Of the 6 planets, Tiny Planets Labs , was their favorite one. This is the one with the arcade games.

Tiny Planets is geared towards children ages 4-12, but older ones will still enjoy playing the games.

Tiny Planets, in my opinion, didn't really seem to have very many educational games.

It is mostly arcade type games, but if your child likes this type of game, they will enjoy Tiny Planets.

One thing that I found very frustrating though, is that you have to log out each time you want to go to a new planet, and then log back in again. I may be doing something wrong here, and maybe you don't have to do this, but I couldn't find any way to avoid it.

Overall Tiny Planets is a fun and safe site for your children to enjoy playing in outer space for a while, and have fun playing games and interacting with other space cadets.


Check out what my fellow Crew Mates thought of Tiny Planets here. 



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*I was asked to review Tiny Planets, and was given items that you usually purchase, free, as a member of the TOS Homeschool Review Crew, in return for my honest opinion. No other compensation has been given to me.*

2 comments:

Cheryl Henderson-Khalid said...

Thank you for taking the time to review the website. You'll be happy to know that in the March rollout you will no longer have to the problem of logging in on each separate site. We're going to have a brand new look and even a few new games, so drop by sometime. :-)

Unknown said...

Hi. Just wanted to thank you again for reviewing the site. I wanted to let you know that on April 4th the new and improved site was launched. I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have, especially since some of the changes were made because of the Crew's suggestions. You can check us out at www.tinyplanets.com. You can reach me at cheryl@mytinyplanets.com.

Thanks!
Cheryl

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