Home giveaway Reviews Trick or TREAT! Gears! Gears! Gears! Sweet Shop Review

Trick or TREAT! Gears! Gears! Gears! Sweet Shop Review

Trick or treat, trick or treat, give me something nice to eat!

I love Halloween, it's so much fun. Pumpkins, spooky costumes, fireworks, I love it all. But my favourite thing about halloween is trick or treating. Why? Because I love sweets, and so do my children. Luckily in our village the response to 'trick or treat' is a big hand full of sweeties, when we went out last year my children came back with two full carrier bags each. Imagine the sugar rush we experienced that half term!

In all seriousness though, we all know too many sweeties are bad for your health (and your sanity, when your children are bouncing from the walls), so it's usually a good idea to find something fun to do that doesn't involve stuffing your face full of sugar. If you are looking for something sweet to keep the children entertained during the school break, this super sweet Gears! Gears! Gears! Sweet Shop from Learning Resources is just the thing to put the 'treat' in to trick or treat.

The Sweet Shop building set is a cog based construction set designed for children aged 4-8, encouraging creative thinking, fine motor skills, and teaching children about cause and effect. It looks pretty delicious, too!

The box comes filled with 28 plastic gears, along with 5 bases, a sticker sheet and a handful of yummy looking cupcakes, ice creams and lollypops. It's all well packaged in little bags too, so you don't have cogs falling all over the place when you open the box for the first time.

The cogs are so bright and colourful, very eye-catching and immediately appealing to the kids. They couldn't wait to get in to the bags and start building. The first task was to make the cogs even more lovely looking by putting sweet stickers on. I let the kids do this themselves, as it is a good way to practice their hand eye coordination.

Once the sticker were in place, the kids began to build some wonderful creations. The set includes some instructions to build the ultimate sweet shop, so we started out with that. Once they had the idea of how it worked, they started using their imaginations to build their own.

To play, you simply place the cogs on the base plates, place the turning gear in to one of the cogs and give it a twirl. If everything is placed correctly all of the cogs should turn creating a beautiful swirling motion. It teaches children about cause and effect, if I place this cog here next to another cog, they will both spin when I turn the gear. It was great to watch the kids give it a go, and see them thinking about where to place the cogs and how moving them around could change the way it worked.

I have to say, once you have built something and start turning the cogs, the combinations of bright colours spinning is pretty mesmerising!

The Sweet Shop Building Set is great for children to play with together. My two spent a couple of hours with it, and it was great to see them working together to problem solve and get all of the gears moving. Another great thing about the set is that the cupcakes and ice creams can be used to role playing games too, and Caitlin enjoyed playing some trick or treat role-play with them.

The toy is something a bit different from toys I would usually buy for my children, and so far it has been a big hit. The kids both love construction toys, but sometimes they are often fiddly and they can be a bit of a struggle for Neil as he struggles with fine motor. The cogs on the Gears! sets are larger and easier to handle for him, while still helping him improve his fine motor skills. Their size makes them easy to put away at the end of play too!

The kids loved playing with the Gears! Gears! Gears! Sweet Shop Building Set, and they were pretty chuffed with some of their creations, as I'm sure you can see from the picture above! We've had hours of play out of it already. I think what the kids loved the most is being able to to take it all apart and build something new, it has so many combinations and possibilities.

If you would like to purchase your own Gears! Gears! Gears! Sweet Shop, you can do so at Learning Resources for £39.54, and you can get 20% off everything with code TREAT15 until the 4th of November.

As a special Halloween treat, the lovely people at Learning Resources are offering one of my lucky readers a Gears! Gears! Gears! Sweet Shop of their own. To win, simply enter below. Good Luck!

We were sent a Sweet Shop Building Set free of charge for the purpose of this review, however as always, all opinions remain my own.

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