This is a great game that can last as long or short as you want it to last.  The basic premise is, you’re going to create your own story and include everyones help.  It’s fun for the parents and even the youngest kid in the car.  When it comes to fun kids games, this is a great car game.  Here’s how it works.

One person starts with the beginning of the story.  For example, dad may start off with something like “A very long time ago, in the deep dark forest where nobody had ever traveled, a little bear cub was climbing up a tree to try to get to his little sister bear on the first branch up.”  This could go on even further or dad could stop right there.  Just make sure you don’t let them go on too long or too short.  You want to make sure each person is adding a good amount to the story without taking it over.

If mom and dad get really creative telling the story with a lot of great descriptions and colorful additions, it helps the kids become more creative.  It’s kind of up to mom and dad to make this a learning game.  Also, feel free to get a little crazy with the story and add in stuff that is just silly and makes people laugh.

We really enjoy this game as a family and always like to include other members of the family in every story.  We’ll even add in little things about each person that we all know are true or at least rumored to be true.

Remember, even though this is one of our car games for kids, it’s also a great game to play when your camping and sitting our the campfire or heading off to sleep in the tents.  You may even be able to turn this into a fun kids party game.

If you can do it, bring along some type of recorder and keep the story for listening back.  You may even want to have somone write it out and everyone helps drawing pictures to include with the story.  It’s a fun little project that creates a souvinere to help you remember the trip.

If you’re a fan of iCarly on Nick, you’re probably going to enjoy this game a great deal.  It’s one of the latest (as of this writing) and most popular games you’ll find on nick.com.  Of course, a lot of kids are going to nick for tons of computer games for kids.  They’re constantly updating their site and come out with new games all the time.

Carly, Sam and Freddie are the main characters on the show and that’s who you’ll be dealing with in this game.  The truth is, it could be just about anyone up there, but knowing it’s Carly, Sam and Freddie makes it more enjoyable for most fans of iCarly.  In case you didn’t know, iCarly is an extremely popular show on Nick about two girls who start a very successful web TV show.  Their friend Freddie helps with all of the video and technical stuff.  It’s actually a very fun show.

In this game, you’ll have to find the “real” Carly, Sam and Freddie in a crowd of imposters or “look alikes.”  You’ll do that be eliminating people based on what their wearing.  There are 3 wheels on the screen.  One for each character, one for the piece of clothing (shirt, pants, and jacket) and lastly one for the color of that clothing.  So, you can ask, for example, “is the real Sam wearing a blue jacket?”  Press the “=” sign and find out.  If it’s a no, you can click on the imposter look alike Sams.  So start eliminating all of the look alike Sams with blue jackets.  Next find out if she’s wearing a red jacket.  If not, eliminate those.

This game takes place in a giant arena and you’re standing in the middle of it.  So you’ll have to check all four sections of the arena to find the real characters.  There are some strategies you can use to speed up the search, but I won’t give those away.  You’ll quickly figure them out.  If you think you’ve found the real Carly, Sam or Freddie, mark them and find out if you’re correct.  You have to find the real deal for each one of the three.

If it sounds easy, it’s not.  If you get to the point where it’s lost it’s challenge, you increase the difficulty by reducing the time you have to search, increasing the number of people you have to sort through and how many different colors of clothing you’ll have to sort through (max of 5). For my dad, he’s kind of color blind, so it’s not easy when he gets too many different shades of colors.

This is one of those learning games for kids that will teach you how to think logically about what you’re doing.  If you don’t come up with a logical system of elimination, it’s going to take you a long time to master the game and you’ll quickly get bored with guessing which is the real character. With the younger kids, it can really help learning and identifying colors.  It’s simple enough for a 3-5 year old, but challenging enough that my dad is hard to pull off of it.

One thing you’ll notice is that you open up a new Spongebob mini game evertime you play.  Just ignore this, it’s simply Nick.coms way of promoting their latest game.  Everyone opens this mini game everytime they play, regardless of how well they do.

One of my favorite places to find computer games for kids is FactMonster.com.  That’s how I stumbled upon this game.  There are so many games at FactMonster, you can play all the time and not play the same game twice.  Plus they tend to make all of their games educational that’s why they call it FACTmonster. So, if you need to practice your math skills, FactMonster may be a place you want to bookmark.

One of the things FactMonster focuses on a lot is kids math games. If you click on Games & Quizzes on the left side of the page, you’ll find Math Games listed.  Once you go to this page, you’ll see there are various games that cover almost all areas of math.  From simple things such as counting, addition and subtraction through to the more difficult items like multiplication, division and even geometry.  Most of the geometry games use something called “Baseball Geometry.”  We’ll explain how that works in a minute.

Baseball Geometry starts off teaching you about the basics of geometry such as the types of angles and how to measure them.  From there it teaches you about types of triangles, calculating the area of a triangle and into Pythagorean theorem (a²+b²=c²).  It also covers circles and finding the area and circumferance as well as polygons and rectangles.

All of this is done while playing a very fun game of baseball.  Don’t worry if you don’t know the rules to baseball, this is a very basic version of the game that is more similar to a home run derby than a full blown game.  Once you answer a question correctly you get a chance to swing and hit the ball.  If you answer the question on the first try, you’ll get 3 pitches.  Answer on the 2nd and you get 2 and if you do it on your third you get just one pitch. You have to click at the exact right time to hit the ball over the fence.  I spent a lot of time learning how to do this and hit more than my fair share of foul balls.  The computer keeps track of your batting average and it will even let you forward that score to your parents.

Give Baseball Geometry a try and you’ll find yourself a little hooked on it.  The math challenges are one thing, but learning how to click that mouse at the exact time will really keeping you coming back for more.  Even my dad spent some time refreshing his memory on some math facts so that he could get another chance at hitting that ball over the fence. Good luck and … PLAY BALL!