Rhode Island Novelty Inflatable Globe Replica 16-inch

This is the cheapest and most educational for a 4 yr old I’m teaching! Highly recommend

Real globes are expensive. And little kids can't be trusted to treat them with the care they deserve. But I figured I had hit on a fun and inexpensive way around that problem for my daughter, a K5 teacher. A way she could use a simple little beach ball globe to help her students visualize our planet, and gain a beginning perspective on this BIG ball we all inhabit. I actually bought two of these inflatable balls, so the teacher would have a spare, in case the first ball "bit the dust" prematurely, before the lesson was quite completed. So my girl made up a lesson plan, imagining a few things she could do with the kids to help teach them all a few fun facts. She blew the first one up on her planning time, only to find that the United States was missing. Apparently the entire country had fallen into the sea. And where it once proudly floated? Nothing but a lot of water...and an ocean alive with floating city and country place names belonging to places far, far away. Undaunted, she blew the other globe up, but it was the same thing. Neither one was accurate. Not representative, not even close. Well, okay. You get what you pay for I suppose. But sometimes? A lot less. And though I knew that these were a cheap novelty? I still expected they would be similar to what the photo showed! Accurate enough for a class full of barely reading little kindergarteners anyway! But that wasn't the end of the story. I couldn't really return these products. This child of mine lives far away, not right down the road...and therefore it's way too much time, trouble, and expense to retrieve and send these "globes" back for a refund. So this becomes my only redress: to let other customers know about this sorry manufacturer, it's inferior products, and my complete dissatisfaction. This is all I can do. I suppose there was a bit of a happy ending though. A little bit or redemption. This same daughter of mine has two beautiful little K5 and 1st graders of her own, so she let them have the balls for play. And it turns out that they DO hold air. Small win, right? The moral of the story here though? The old quote: "You spins the wheel, you takes your chances!

Our family origins are all over the globe, so I use this globe to point out all the places we came from. Grandkids love it.

The colors are fairly sloppily applied to the different countries, and the country names are old: it's still showing Yugoslavia and Zaire (and Zaire is blobbed in with Rwanda and Burundi as one blue shape). The kids I wanted to use it with are from Eritrea, which wasn't yet independent at the time of the globes this was based on. However, it did inflate just by blowing (once I poked a hole in the input valve), and at least it didn't have AI mistakes in country names, which other, similar products on the market have. I guess this is a case of "you get what you pay for." None of the cheap, inflatable beach-ball globes are very good. Now I know.

Cute but not accurate.If you just want a simple globe to get an idea of the world it’s fine. If you want to find any particular location it’s not exactly accurate.But as a portable easy to use globe, I would recommend it!

As described

I wasn't looking at my atlas so I got this. It floats around my living room

At first I could not inflate it. The valve was blocked somehow, and I had to clear it by inserting a screwdriver. Once the globe was inflated, I started checking the printing. Half of Greenland was missing. Large cities in the US were shown, but no states were named. United Kingdom was named, but not England, Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland. And, when fully inflated, it was about 11 inches in diameter, not 16 inches. I guess this has some value for a young person who has no idea of how countries are located, but it's basically a piece of junk.

Sent it to my 5 yr old grandson in a letter with dots showing where his family all lived. He loved it. Mostly because it’s a ball.

Very high price for the quality

Be fun on the beach !

I wanted to have an inflatable globe in my classroom and now I do. Unfortunately, I can’t use it as a learning tool since there are missing countries, countries in the wrong place, and incorrect labels.I had to draw about 90% of Greenland and about 75% of Antarctica.I guess this is what a $6 inflatable globe gets you.