This is probably the lowest I have seen the LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer on sale for as it is usually around either the full price of £79.99 or around the £67.99 mark. Play has reduced it to a very tasty £47.99 with free delivery and a saving of £32. Nice.

• Click here to get playing with Play

The LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer is the latest generation of electronic learning and gaming that’s completely kid friendly. It has plenty of activities to keep kids entertained including games, apps and eBooks.

Kids can explore their creativity with a variety of different programs and share them with friends and family via email or Facebook. The LeapPad has no Wi-Fi or 3G of its own though, you have to connect it through a PC or laptop.

There is a built-in camera and editing tools for the images too. The LeapPad doesn’t have mains power unfortunately so you will have to feed it four AA batteries a time. I recommend rechargeables to save on cash.

Thanks to welt at HUKD!

Play.com have taken £4 off the My First Painting sets from producer Alex. They are selling Puppy Paradise and Playful Kitty for £5.99 instead of £9.99.

• Paint a Puppy Paradise

• Paint a Playful Kitty

At first I thought these were like the paint-by-numbers sets from my childhood, but it seems they’re not. With the Activity Kits from Alex, you’ll get three different sized natural bristle brushes and three acrylic paints along with a stretched, pre-printed canvas, so that little ones can paint like a real artist, but have the freedom to create their own masterpiece.

The canvas is a 10" x 12"and along with paints and brushes, you’ll also receive a pallet and a colour wheel.

This is listed as being suitable for children aged 5 and over.

There’s a Disney Mickey Mouse Spy Glass Telescope on offer at Play.com for £6.49 instead of £7.99.

• See the world differently with the Mickey Mouse Spy Glass

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is possibly the bane of my existence, and that Mousekatool business with Toodles is enough to drive me into the ground, much like Mickey’s foldaway clubhouse, but unfortunately, it’s probably my daughter’s favourite Youtube viewing.

As a result, I know she’d just love the spy-glass with four different coloured ‘lenses’. While the spy-glass itself is quite bold and colourful, the lenses come in four different colours so youngsters can literally view the world in any colour they want – of the four choices, anyway – and take a closer look at things, since the spy-glass is actually a magnifying glass.

It’s a good £4 - £8 cheaper than the same thing at other retailers, and of course, with Play.com, delivery is free.

Play.com is selling the Disney Minnie Mouse soft toy for £7.99 instead of £12.99, which is a very nice saving indeed. You will also get this fun toy delivered to your door for free and, apparently it will be dispatched within 24 hours. Way to go Play.

• Click here to get cuddly with Play.com

The Disney Minnie Mouse toy is a 10 inch fashion doll which has a variety of different clothes. She has her traditional bow in her hair along with some accessories and a dress and shoes. There is absolutely no description of Fashion Minnie on the site so I’m guessing a bit here.

I think, and I could be wrong, that this Fashion Minnie is so called because you can take her clothes off and put them back on again. I have no proof though, haha. She certainly is very cute and will definitely serve as a lovely gift for a Disney mad child, if nothing else.

Thanks to wishihadadonkey at HUKD!

Play.com has almost £10 off the Learning Resources Calculator Cash Register and Money. It’s selling for £25.69 instead of £35 and is covered by their free delivery policy.

Learn through play

Children from 3 years old can have endless fun while learning about addition, subtraction and generally about money – assuming they actually work things out and don’t rely on the calculator, that is.

This cash register set looks to be perfect for role play and has won 23 awards for it’s ‘excellence’.

There are conflicting versions of this toy online, with some saying it requires no batteries and others saying it requires one for the ‘ding’ sound.  The calculator is solar powered too. Additionally, although Play.com doesn’t actually say this, it looks like the coins might be in Sterling too, and looking at pictures online there are definitely two types of currency.

This should include 30 life-sized play money bills, 40 plastic coins, a pretend credit card and a booklet of suggested activities, but unfortunately Play.com isn’t clear on any of that.

It could be a great way to teach children about money, in a playful way.

The Peppa Pig Toothbrush with a collectable Peppa Pig Figure is reduced by £1 from £2.99 to £1.99 with free delivery. A toothbrush for £1.99 is a great price anyway, but putting a figurine in it too makes it a winner for most Peppa Pig fans.

• Brush with Peppa

So, basically, this is a toothbrush.

And it’s pink.

And that’s about that.

Oh, and it comes with a collectable Peppa Pig figurine. Have I mentioned that before? Oh, I have? Sorry.

Thing is, there’s not much else to say. There are four reviews, and they say pretty much the same, except they do say that it’s made tooth brushing time more fun for the kids, and that’s always a bonus.
The definite winner, however, is the fact that it costs only £1.99.

Thanks to Wadjet at HUKD

Play.com has reduced the price of the Insect Lore Live Butterly Garden from £14.99 to £8.99. This deal saves you almost half the original price on a real butterfly hatching kit that kids will love.

• Click here to make butterflies with Play.com

The Live Butterfly Garden kit is educational and fun. Kids can raise five Painted Lady butterflies while learning all about metamorphosis with this award-winning Butterfly Garden. Kids will love learning and exploring the world with this and I am SO getting one for my daughter!

You can watch and observe each caterpillar’s transition as it matures, changes into a chrysalis and finally emerges as a Painted Lady butterfly. Then, once they are all grown, you can release them into the wild and start all over again.

The set includes the habitat and complete instructions and is suitable for kids aged four and up. It doesn’t say if you get the caterpillar’s though although one of the reviewers says you get a certificate which you need to redeem for your caterpillars.

Thanks to chuckiedoll at HUKD!

Whirley’s Windmill Designer kits are for sale at Play.com, available for £14.29 instead of £18.99.

• Make the wind do sometime good for you

Little ones – six and over, preferably, but not under three due to small parts – can make beautiful paper windmills with the Whirleys Windmill Maker.

The kit gives you everything you need to punch, slice and pin the pretty papers to create lots of different windmills.

How does it work? Select your paper design and using the tools included, punch a hole in each corner. Place the paper on the wheel, punch a hole in the centre, then slice four ways using the guides.

Fold the paper in from the four sides and affix with one of the supplied pins. Using the fastener, pop in the stick and give it a spin.

You can place the windmills on sticks or use sticky pads to accessorize cards, photo frames, notebooks and so on.

The kit includes the Windmill Maker, 10 fasteners, 10 pins, 10 stick connectors, 3 sticks, 10 sticky pads, 20 patterned discs, 20 paper squares and an instruction sheet.

Oh man! I nearly fell over myself when I saw this Facebox Stencil Kit at Play.com. They’re selling it for £4.79 instead of £6.50 – not a huge saving, just £1.71, but not a bad price for hours of fun!

• Design a whole cast of characters with the Stencil Kit Tin

I have, in my box of school things, a book that someone in my class put together many, many years ago. He had done caricatures of the whole class, and we’d photocopied it and everyone got one. It was one of those ‘fad’ things that move through schools and it hung around for ages.  Everyone drew caricatures, even the artistically challenged like me. Our stencils were traced and shared, and we were never as sophisticated as this, but man, it was fun. It was memorable!

With the Stencil Kit Tin, you choose a head shape, then add hairstyles and features, such as sunglasses, facial hair or hats.

The three stencils in the kit apparently can create over 100,000 different faces. And as an added bonus you receive three felt coloured pens packed in the colour print tin too.

Play.com has reduced a variety of bags on their site and one of these happens to be the Disney Toy Story 3 dude. Originally selling for £9.99, you are saving £7.10 and paying a lovely £2.89 including free delivery. Brilliant.

• Click here to get carrying with Play.com

The bag is smothered in Toy Story 3 pictures and has plenty of storage space within. It has a drawstring fastening and is 38x29.5cm in size. While not worth the original price by any means, it certainly is a good bargain coming in at under £3 all inclusive.

You will also find the Cars 2 trainer bag down to £2.99 – and apparently both this and the Toy Story 3 one are for kid’s trainers – and the Disney Princess Jewels swimbag is down to £3.99. Take a look at some of the other items in the list below as they are all down to decent prices and could fulfil those urgent storage and transportation needs!

Thanks to Wadjet at HUKD!

It seems that Play enjoys selling backpacks. I feel like there is a kids backpack deal every other day but each time it is a new movie or series that is depicted on the plastic front. A part of me thinks it is pretty cool to have so much variety, the other part screams, “aarh waste!”.

• Click here to get Darth Vader at Play.com

Anyway, the Star Wars Darth Vader backpack is down from £9.99 to £2.99 (I always feel really bad for people who paid full price when I see discounts like this) which is a saving of £7. Of course, this Darth Vader backpack will be sent to you via their extremely slow and awful free delivery.

The backpack has a large plastic front with Darth looking intimidating and tense on the cover, waving his lightsaber about and generally scaring the pants off those of us who were young when the first movies came out. If Darth doesn’t work out for you, you can get the Doctor Who backpack for even less!

Thanks andywedge at HUKD!

The Thomas & Friends 1001 Sticker Book has been reduced from £5.99 to £3.16 at both Play and Amazon. The book comes with free delivery on both sites and has a saving of £2.83 in total.

• Click here to get stickers from Play

The 1001 Sticker Fun Books are packed with stickers as well as loads of puzzles, games and activities which are great for keeping little minds and hands busy on wet and rainy days. And, let’s face it, there are plenty of those at the moment!

The Thomas & Friends book comes with as many Thomas stickers as you could possibly want and you can use them to complete certain activities or just spice them up a tad. The activities and puzzles are all train themed and include all the Thomas characters from the popular TV series.

The book would make a great addition to the home book shelf and looks like plenty of fun for kids. There are certainly enough stickers in there!

Thanks to lucerysmum at HUKD!

There’s £5 off the Voila Wooden Pretend and Play Tidbits at Play.com, selling at £9.99 with free delivery.

• Develop a taste for the unusual with the pretend and play tidbits

Perfect for a play tea party, this Voila Wooden finger snack tray has some pretty unusual food on it. During both my pregnancies’ first trimesters, all I could keep down was sashimi – raw salmon – despite the fact that you’re not supposed to eat raw fish. Oddly, though, my two year old had to have her own portion of sashimi whenever we eat it otherwise she eats most of mine, so for us this would be a great set, definitely!

This wooden Tidbits set consists of six sushi pieces,  a shrimp, a chicken thigh, an olive, sausage and cherry tomato skewer, a sandwich and two little other bites I can’t quite figure out!

It comes on a lovely wooden serving tray with printed doily and I’m sure you’ll be pretend eating fake food for many happy years.

Play.com have another Great Gizmos gizmo on sale: a Make Your Own Mini Scrapbook kit, selling for £5.99 instead of £9.99.

• Record your Easter holiday memories

This Great Gizmos Make Your Own Mini Scrapbook kit allows you to create a scrapbook with 24 full colour pages. There are more than 180 little templates to personalise your pages to your heart’s content.

The kit includes a front and back cover, 12 sheets of printed inner paper, six sheets of patterned templates, 12 sheets of colourful printed paper, a sheet of alphabet stickers and glue.

While they say that it’s suitable for children over eight years of age (although the features page says five and over!), I guess it’s really more dependent on the child, and the end result you’re hoping for, but they do say not suitable for under 36 months due to swallowable bits, I suppose.

An ideal rainy day activity for an older child, or a nice way to commemorate a special time together.

Play have a sale on the Tidlo Wooden Flower Press which is currently selling at £6.99 instead of £12.99, saving £6, and coming with free delivery.

• Save yourself a memento of spring

It’s a beautiful time of year, and like the poets of old, I think Spring is the best time of the year to be in England.

With this Wooden Flower Press, you can save yourself a bit of Spring and bring some colour into your art and craft time.  The Tidlo range – from John Crane’s own range of toys – are bright and colourful and excellent quality.

This flower press has easy to use flower shaped fasteners which are big enough for little fingers to use and manipulate into a sturdy press.

There’s no info on how long flowers have to stay in the press to dry out, but once done you can use them for card decorating, pictures and I’m sure, a whole lot more.

The Tidlo Wooden Flower Press is made from replenishable wood, and child safe paints and so on.

Play has reduced the Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab Phantastic Phun kit from £14.99 to £6.99 which is a nice saving of half the original price. This would make a superb birthday present or addition to the Present Cupboard for this Christmas.

• Click here to get experimenting with Play.com

The Phantastic Phun blast lab has loads of interesting experiments testing for household acids and bases. You get your own pH indicator papers and a scale to help you on your experimental way, along with plenty of other extras and bits and pieces too.

You can make egg shells disappear, clean coins, make a volcano and there is even a recipe for making green eggs (don’t forget to nab some ham so you can make that lovely Dr Seuss breakfast…) All of the activities are described in the instruction manual so you do have help along the way.

There isn’t a lot of information as to what exactly is included in the kit but it does look like enormous fun. And the Messy Mess kit is also on sale if you prefer.

Thanks to Syzable at HUKD!

Play has reduced this rather funky looking remote control helicopter from £29.99 to £12.99 and it comes with their lovely free delivery too. You are saving £17 off the original price which is a huge saving and brilliant for those lovely upcoming birthdays.

• Click here to get flying with Play.com

The remote control helicopter uses a three channel control system for precision cockpit command and works straight out of the box. The RC Air Tiger has an auto balance feature for ease of use so that first timers can have as much fun as those with plenty of practise.

The helicopter can move forwards, backwards, left, right, up and down and you can keep full control of your speed using the flying system that is included in the kit. You will need to be careful where you fly it, obviously, and it is likely that the required batteries are not included in the price. A great deal for fans of remote control fun.

Thanks to logie31 at HUKD!

Play.com have offered a Trespass Swift Pattern 200 Two Person Pop Up Tent for £42.99 instead of £69.99 for Easter Weekend only, saving you £27.

• Get ready for the summer

This tent will lead to one of two things happening at whatever festival you take it to: you’ll never not know where your tent is, or you’ll get into someone else’s if they have the same one!  It’s colourful and bright and should certainly stand out amid the field of plain coloured temporary accommodation!

Apparently the Swift 200 is the ultimate in lazy camping: You open the portable carry bag and the tent assembles itself.

This is a 2 person tent, with ventilation flaps, a waterproof scoring of 1500mm and taped seams. While it doesn’t require ropes and pegs, it’s recommended if you’re camping in a windy spot, and comes with them included.

In my experience with pop up tents it’s the packing up that’s a little harder, so this comes with instructions on how to do that too.

This looks quite pretty, and a bit of fun as well. The Jumbo Disney Princess Wiz Around Musical Floor Puzzle has been reduced to £7.99 by Play.com, down from its RRP of £12.

• Click here for your Disney princess musical floor puzzle at Play.com

There aren't many details about this on the website. Looking at another website, I found some more information. From the picture of the box, it looks like the same product. I'm not 100% sure though!

First the child has to solve this 48 piece giant floor  jigsaw (45 x 60cm). When complete it will  reveal the Grand Hall from the Cinderella animation.

Once constructed, wind up the included prince and princess figurine and it will 'waltz' around the scene when placed into the pre-cut tracks. This Disney Princess Floor Children'sPuzzle also features a sound box which, plays an elegant and beautiful melody .

This Musical Floor Puzzle contains 48 large jigsaw pieces , a musical sound box and 2 wind up figures of a princess and princess which 'dance' around the scene. Encourage shape recognition and problem solving among children aged 3 and up with the Disney Princess Wiz Around Musical Floor Puzzle.

A customer on another site comments that "The puzzle is just the right difficulty level for my 4 yr old and she loves it when the prince and princess whizz around."

Thanks to wishihadadonkey at HUKD!

Having a hard time with money? Or more realistically with teaching children about money? Well, Play.com have an offer on at the moment where you can buy this money making kit for £5.99 instead of £10, saving you £4.01.

• Make your own currency

Okay, what does this teach? Maths? Possibly. Counting? Sure. Making your own play money? Awesome. How to get into counterfeiting early on? We hope not. But it does look like a nice way of introducing money and the concept of currency to children!

With this set, you can make Yen, Pounds, Dollars and Euros and use the stamping inks to design currency combinations of your choice.

Play.com is pretty sparse on information, like how much it could make and so on, and there aren’t any reviews, but you know… sometimes you have to spend money to make money.

Thanks to wishihadadonkey on HUKD