Spotlight on Okido Magazine, a brilliant arts and science magazine for kids!

Issue 24: Animals. Bear Blueberry and Banana Pancakes are more awesome than awesomeness itself!

Though we narrowly missed featuring Okido Magazine as part of our #ReadItMD13 Comics and Magazines Week last week, we still wanted to tell you all about Okido Magazine - an arts and science mag for kids that won't break the bank, is absolutely packed to the rafters with interesting content and well worth looking into if you're seeking an alternative to those nasty plastic-gift trash mags.

Children soak up knowledge like a sponge from a very early age, so being able to source magazines and comics that can help further their knowledge at the same time as being a huge amount of fun isn't as easy as you'd think.

Thankfully there are some brilliant magazines out there that do just that - and Okido is one of them. For instance, in the issue pictured above you can whizz up those delicious bear pancakes and find out a metric ton of interesting facts and figures about the animals we share a planet with (for instance, what exactly IS an animal? Is a spider? Does a bird count? Where do they live and what do they eat?)

Each issue of Okido Magazine (which arrives quarterly and costs £4.00 per issue with subscription charges at reduced rates too) follows a particular theme...

Issue 23 - all about taste (and it made our tummies rumble a LOT)

As the cover says, there are stories (and some brilliant kid-friendly comic strips of course!), activities (lots and lots of them - particularly some great inspiration for things to do during that long long school summer holiday), games, doodles, experiments and even poems.

For parents, the price of magazines can quite often be offputting so looking at any new magazine is always an exercise in balancing content and price. I can comfortably say that Okido ticks both boxes and Charlotte has spent a huge amount of time with these whereas we've always found the 'popular' TV character-based or licensed magazines such as the CBeebies Mag (which is by no means the worst of the bunch - at least it has a fair amount of educational content) are all over and done with as soon as the sticker sheets are used up - which for Charlotte takes about 20 mins at best!

The magazine is pitched at children aged 3 and above, but it's eminently suitable for kids up to the age of 8, thanks in no small part to the brilliant presentation and the way it doesn't "talk down" to your child.

Drop by the Okido website and take a look at the subscriptions page and the list of stockists to see what you think.

(Okido very kindly sent us the above issues for review).