


We use them on random spring Tuesdays when the two of them just want to bounce for a few minutes. My kids, now 7 and 5, have used both of these inflatables scores of times. They’re delighted to spend the afternoon scrambling up the climbing wall, skidding and jumping down the slide, and splashing around in the pool. The tubing is kind of a pain to set up well, and my soaking-wet kids don’t seem to care. The Bountech structure comes with tubing that you can attach to the inflatable water guns on the side, but I’ve used that only once or twice. It typically takes me about 10 minutes to fill ’er up. Like the Little Tikes bounce house, the Bountech structure takes just a couple of minutes to inflate. Then I fill the shallow pool with a few inches of water using my (Wirecutter pick) Dramm hose. There’s a climbing wall that leads to a slide that leads to a shallow pool of water festooned with inflated water guns and a basketball hoop. The Bountech inflatable-which appears under a few different brand names on Amazon-looks like a cheesy monstrosity.


This inflatable, too, has been a godsend. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said to my wife when we received the gift of a second giant inflatable. Not to be outdone, my brother (who seems to believe that love is best measured based on the physical size and outrageousness of gifts given) bought my kids this Bountech inflatable climbing wall and waterslide contraption. The Little Tikes inflatable house let them gigglingly bounce themselves to the brink of exhaustion. In the early days of the pandemic, my kids, then 4 and 2, were cooped up at home with no school, playgrounds, or friends for nearly three months. The bounce house has proven to be a godsend. “This looks like a gigantic pain,” I thought. My wife and I reacted with a mix of incredulity and mild annoyance. Bouncing Balls can also strengthen pattern recognition as well as critical planning and decision making skills.My sister-in-law bought my kids our first bounce house-the Little Tikes Jump ’n Slide Bouncer-for Christmas in 2019. Playing this game will help improve ability to visualize angles and use them to aim. WHAT YOU LEARN FROM PLAYING BOUNCING BALLS Instead of throwing them around randomly, try aiming to set up groups that limit vertical stacks to two or three balls at a time to keep them from hitting the bottom. If you’re stuck with a color that doesn’t match any groups of two or more, you’ll have to place it somewhere on the board. Use those bigger color groups to anchor in excess balls before knocking them out. When you clear a group higher up in the chain, the balls below will fall too. It can be a bit tricky to find the perfect angle before shooting, but the more you try this trick out, the better you’ll get at detecting them! This is a good strategy to use when you’re trying to place a ball into a tight spot. You can use the walls around the screen to bounce balls into place. The faster you clear the board the more points you’ll get! The game ends when a ball hits the bottom. Clear all of the balls to get to the next level. Destroy the balls by shooting them into groups of three or more.
