A safari from the sofa: lions, giraffes and tracks in the sand
Your child may never see a lion in the wild, but they can still learn how a lion family lives. Our savanna game takes your child on a safari. All instructions, facts and questions are read aloud, so no reading is needed.
What your child learns on the savanna
The savanna is a whole world in one place. Your child learns that animals live in families, share a watering hole and eat very different food. That is a first lesson in how nature fits together.
The game uses your child as the measuring stick. A meerkat is smaller, a lion is about as tall, and a giraffe towers far above.
Reading tracks asks for careful looking: how many toes are there, and is it a paw or a hoof?
- Family words: pride, lioness, cub and mane
- Ordering by size, from the smallest animal to the tallest
- Looking closely: counting toes and telling a paw print from a hoof print
- Day and night: who is busy in the hot sun, and who wakes up when it gets cool
Why we made this game
Who is the king of the animals? Why does the daddy lion have all that hair? Behind questions like these is a bigger one: how do wild animals live together?
So we built the game around a lion family. Children meet the daddy, the mommy and the cubs, and learn that the lionesses do most of the hunting, together, as a team.
From there, the game opens up to the neighbors: giraffes, zebras, elephants, hippos, rhinos and meerkats. Each one shows a new way to live in the same warm, grassy land.
Real facts matter to us, even in a game for small children. Lions really do rest most of the day, and cubs really are born with spots. The game says so in simple words.
What children love about it
Children can press the roar button as often as they like. On the tracks screen, they play detective. Four toes and no claws? A lion walked here. Only two toes? That was the ostrich.
At the watering hole, children drag every animal to the water. Then they switch to night: the sky goes dark, the lions wake up and the hippo climbs out to eat.
On the food screen, try giving the lion an ice cream. The answer comes right away: no, ice cream is for your child!
In the quiz, every right answer is a paw print for Leo the lion cub. He walks along the prints and grows. With enough right answers, he grows into a big lion with a real mane.
For a calm finish, the memory game has 4, 6 or 8 pairs of savanna animals.
How to play it together
Play the tallest-animal screen side by side, standing up. Stretch up like a giraffe, crouch like a meerkat, and let your child guess who is next before you tap. Afterward, talk about what you saw: the American Academy of Pediatrics suggests talking with young children about what they see on screens.
Have toy animals at home? Line them up from smallest to tallest, just like on the screen. Then put your child in the line too.
After playing, look for tracks in real life: a cat, a dog, a bird in wet sand or snow. Count the toes together and ask which savanna animal it reminds them of.