Nintendo Handheld Console – Is it a good buy for a 6 year old?
Nov 21st, 2008 by Nintendo DSi
Nintendo HandHeld Console ? would you buy one? if so why?
This is the question. Why would a young child (6-10) want a Handheld Nintendo Console.
- Does your child like to learn interactively?
- Does your child often get bored and need something to do for an hour or so?
- Is your child learning to read?
- Is your child learning to count?
- Is your child learning colours (this is more for younger children like my 3 year old)
If you can answer yes to any of these questions then maybe your child needs a Nintendo Handheld Console to learn with. They may think… woooow a handheld nintendo console!!! but your thinking about buying games that they will enjoy but that will stimulate the additional brain activity in play.
So they play and progress learning at an accelerated rate. This is rubbish you may be thinking.. but it is actually true. My son is now 6 and has had his Handheld DS for 2 years now and the first things he started to play (games I bought on purpose) was ‘scrabble’, ‘my word coach’, ‘brain training’ and ‘maths play’ I think its called. he did also get ‘super mario brothers’ and ‘mario karts ds’ as well.. I’m not that cruel to only buy learning software. 
The main thing we have noticed is that after a couple of months of using the ds and software he started in year 1 of school and he was already reading books fluently. He didnt alays understand all the situations in those books but he understood all of the word and how to spell them. By the end of year 1 (july 2008) he was reading year 3 books for his reading homework.
The same has happened with his maths work as well.. to be honest it has been pretty amazing to see and put a lot of it down to working through the maths lessons on his Handheld DS. It may be partially in his genes on the maths side as I’m an software engineer and am pretty good in that area too.
But I dont believe so. He has also been invited to a 4th year maths session that they carry out once a week for an hour too. So you can image how proud I am at the moment.
The thing is he didn’t show any exceptional talent before he started using the learning software on his Nintendo Handheld Console, so i do believe this is what accelerated his learning and something that I believe other parents should at least look at.
Much of the software mentioned can now be bought pretty cheaply on places like ebay and at play.com and other similar sites.
I’ll post more information on the particular parts of the software themselves that seem to be more relevant to the learning process.
