Review: Haba Palette of Pegs

Apparently I’m old enough to be a grandma.

Even though many friends my age have grandchildren that really hadn’t occurred to me until our little friend, Ella, age 2-and-a-half, started referring to me as Nonna this past weekend. (That’s what she calls her mommy’s mother.)

We thought that was hilarious… and adorable. Does that make me an honorary grandma?

Lyle and I got spend a couple of days with Ella’s family at a church camp in Tacoma, Washington. We had so much fun playing with the children. I took along a couple of games I got to review for Timberdoodle to share with them.

You may remember I reviewed Bloxels last winter. It wasn’t a hit with my girls but I wondered if a boy would enjoy it more. I had set it aside to give to Ella’s 7-year-old brother, Drew.

Oh, my goodness! I think I should have reviewed it with him to start with. He immediately caught on to what it was and how it worked. The campground didn’t have wi-fi so he could download the app, but he still spent many hours building characters and game worlds with the plastic blocks and game board. He would explain in great detail how each design would theoretically work in the game. He literally carried the box around with him the entire weekend and said he couldn’t wait until he had a chance to get the app.

Haba Palette of Pegs

Little Miss Ella was happy to help me review Haba Palette of Pegs.

Recommended for children ages 2-6, it is included in Timberdoodle’s Tiny Tots curriculum kit. I love open-ended activity sets like this, especially when they are such nice quality. This set is made of wood and painted in bright appealing colors. It includes the board, 16 pegs in 8 colors, and 16 matching rings.

Each peg is exactly the height of two rings, but if you put a peg in the board it makes it stick up through the ring a bit. This design makes it perfect for a stacking activity as the pegs help stabilize the rings.

Making tall towers turned out to be Ella’s favorite activity with this set, at least while I was playing with her.

Then she tossed the pieces into the box one by one before deciding what to try next.

She discovered that the rings fit nicely on adult fingers…

…and she had fun seeing how many she could put on Lyle’s hand.

While Ella was occupied with the rings I filled the board up with the pegs. Then I challenged her to match the colors.

She did pretty well, except for putting the lime green ring on the yellow peg. Still… can’t you see how close those colors are?

The colors are my one complaint with this set. They are bright and appealing and most of them are great for reinforcing color names… but we found the inclusion of teal, lime, and navy to be confusing for this age. In my opinion it would be better to have a grass green, a purple, and maybe black, brown, or white.

All in all, it’s a fun set, great for keeping a little one safely engaged for a long time. Ella, of course, just thought it was fun. She didn’t realize we were working on her fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, sorting, visual discrimination, and color recognition.