Find It!

We are a fan of the Find It! games. We have a few of them at our house, and we have bought some for family members. Have you ever seen them? Basically they are cylinders filled with little confetti beads, and inside those beads are objects to find. The objects pop out when your shake it and roll it around and try to move the beads around to find a new thing. Each one comes with a notepad that has a list to check off with the objects. Every one has a penny which is extremely hard to find -- so hard that the company's website has a section where you can boast that you've finally found the penny! (We've never, ever, found a penny in any of them, by the way. I swear they've glued it to something in the middle or something.)

There are several version of  Find It! -- they are usually centered around a theme. We have "Kids" (show above). We also have "Sports," which was a gift for my husband. My parents and my in-laws have "At the Beach," since both like to visit Cape Cod often. I'm sure we will eventually end up with others -- I was just looking at their website to write this post and "On the Farm" or "At the Zoo" would be fun ones for the twins in the future; Big Girl would love "On a Bird Watch" since she loves birds. There's also a very girlie "Glitz and Glamour" one that is perfect for any lady in your life.

My parents just went on vacation and came home with a new one for Big Girl -- the "Starry Night" version. It's the first one that isn't the classic cylinder shape, and some of the pieces you need to find are glow-in-the-dark.

My attempt at a product shot.

It's definitely pretty cool, and much harder than the others we have. The objects follow a "space" theme, and you even have to find all the planets. I thought it would be easy to do in the dark, but the objects don't seem to glow as well as we thought they might. I'm kind of wondering if they need to exposed to light to "light up" more, like some glow-in-the-dark objects do. The one negative to this one compared to the others is that it doesn't have the list of items to find on the actual container. All the cynlinder-shaped ones have the list on one end -- this one doesn't have the list on it at all. If you misplace the notepad, it would be hard to remember what to find!

I give all the Find It! games a thumbs up, especially to take on the road for trips. It's a contained game that you can pass around, or a child can do on their own, or you can just leave in a room and look at every now and then. They can keep kids busy for a long time. They don't require batteries!! And they don't take up a great deal of space. The company website even has a list of different ways to play with Find It! here.

They also make great birthday gifts! I've seen them locally in our teacher store, but you also see them in gift shops or, of course, online.

I've seen some "homemade" versions of Find It! games on blogs and on Pinterest, but I think that is one craft I don't need to make myself. I think my homemade version might result in a mess in my house since I'm sure the twins would "find" a way to get the top off a jar or plastic container. The real "Find It!" games seem pretty secure and unbreakable -- so far!