めばえ Magazine for Toddlers

I think this magazine cover is going to give me a seizure!

My daughter recently received a copy of “Mebae／めばえ” magazine for her birthday. It is a Japanese magazine for children ages 2-4. It is filled with lots of short stories, stickers to paste on specific pages, games, crafts, furoku, and advertisements.It has given us hours of things to read and do together.

“Furoku” basically means a bonus gift. In the March issue that we received, the main furoku was a Build-Your-Own-Power-Shovel. There is absolutely no way that a toddler can put this together on their own. It took my engineer-husband nearly half an hour to put ours together (he doesn’t know Japanese but he figured it out). The finished toy is pretty cool:

めばえcosts 550 yen in Japan. My parents bought it for $11.00 at the local Japanese bookstore. I’ve been looking online to see if you can get it through Amazon or eBay, but it doesn’t look like you can.  We’ve collected old children’s magazines at garage sales where the furoku is missing, but we have still enjoyed reading the stories together.

I’ve blogged about this before, but click here to go to dakko.jp’s website called “おやこであそぼ”. It has a lot of fun activities for kids divided by age.