The Love2Read Photo Books are a fab way to encourage children to enjoy reading, where they can be the star!

Our recent holiday to Tenerife was a lot of fun. But like most parents we never seem to get round to printing our holiday photos out - or any photos for that matter, as the world goes digital and we tend to keep all our pics on various digital or cloud sources.

So for once, it was extremely nice to be able to put together something unique and personal that had a dual purpose. Not only offering an attractive little summary of our holiday, but also a great little reading book for Charlotte to enjoy too.

Coming up with the idea of a web-driven book design service that uses various subjects (as you can see from the header image above, books about dad, holidays, friends etc) that can be tailored in a very easy to use online interface, Love2Read lets parents (and children) put together the books, before they're submitted for printing.

You'll get an absolutely BRILLIANT confirmation email back once your book is ready, then it will wing its way to you in the post.

It's a great idea for parents to do these as surprise presents for children or for books that a child can read while staying with grandparents or other family (our holiday one has been a huge hit with our relatives and friends) who can snuggle down with Charlotte and let her read it to them.

As mentioned before, the site is easy to use and you can save your photobook project part way through and come back to it.

The only thing we could mention really is that there's a list of keywords at the back of the book, common phrases that I'm assuming could've been drawn from the book's text but we couldn't see any way to alter this in the online design tools - so when our book turned up it just had the words "Holiday" and "Book" repeated over and over again rather than a list of words we'd come up with ourselves. It seemed to be the only part of the process that needed a tweak.

The results are great though and it's definitely something we'll consider using again for different book subjects or occasions. So whether you're looking for a unique surprise gift for a child just taking their first steps in reading independently, or just want a brilliant memento of an event or to celebrate a family member's birthday this is a really nice little idea.

(We were kindly supplied with a promo code in order to be able to use the Love2Read Service and try it out for ourselves)

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).