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Playtime Helps Children Develop Their “Power to Be”

September 28, 2009 By

Duracell believes that children have the power to be anything they want to be, and that play time is an important part of helping them achieve their goals. In partnership with toy experts Chris Byrne and Jim Silver from www.TimeToPlayMag.com, Duracell selected some of the most innovative toys that can help kids develop the skills they need to reach their goals. This past Spring, Duracell completed the Power to Be survey, which interviewed 507 U.S. children ages 8-12 to find out what they want to be when they grow up. Some of the top professions were:

• Athletes (10 percent of boys)
• Veterinarians (17 percent of girls)
• Teacher (14 percent of girls)
• Military professionals (11 percent of boys)

I surveyed my three kids, and the answers were Paleontologist (Ryan),  Scientist (or race car driver) (Nathan), and Mommy (Kaitlyn).  The results of the survey were published on Time to Play, the online toy magazine. Time to Play reviews pretty much every toy there is, then rounds them up by category as Editor’s Picks.  Time to Play contacted me about the Duracell survey, asked me what my kids had said they wanted to be when they grew up, then sent me toys that would reinforce the skills they would need to reach their goals. How cool is that?

For Ryan, who wants to be a Paleontologist, we received the board game Ruin. Two to four players move their pawns around a three-dimensional board towards the center of a Mayan ruin with every roll of the huge 20-sided die. By putting down cards, players change the path and can either help the player create a secret passage OR wall off their opponent so they have to turn around and go a different way. Ryan and I ended up giggling nonstop as we kept throwing down cards and turning each other around and around! Ruin won several awards last year including a Parent’s Choice and the iParenting Media Award for Greatest Product. Buy it directly from the manufacturer, Buffalo Games, for $24.95. Recommended for ages 10 and up.
buffalogames_ruin

Nathan’s career ambitions are still ambiguous, but he looked at the toy choices from Time to Play and picked the EyeClops Bionic Eye made by Jakks Pacific. EyeClops is a handheld magnification device that plugs into your TV with A/V jacks and then magnifies what you are looking at. Just plug it directly into the A/V jack on an ordinary television and use the adjustable multi-zoom lens with 100x, 200x and 400x magnification to turn ordinary objects into extraordinary images right on the TV screen. We looked at a clump of dog hair, a Cheerio, the skin on our hands. It’s a cool way to introduce kids to the idea of looking at ordinary objects up close to see what they are made of. Just don’t be surprised if your boys want to look at boogers :P    Buy it on the Jakks Pacific website for $39.99, recommended for ages 6 and up.

bionic_eye

The toy we received for Kaitlyn is Caring Corners Mrs. Goodbee’s Dollhouse, which I reviewed separately here. Please come read the post to see why this is the ONLY dollhouse you need to buy this Christmas!

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Hasbro Family Game Night and Connect 4 Giveaway

September 23, 2009 By

What are you doing tonight? How would you like to join Hasbro in a Family Game Night?  Hasbro is encouraging families to turn off the TV tonight and gather the family to play classic and updated versions of their popular games like Connect 4, Boggle, Monopoly, Clue, and Candy Land.

At BlogHer this past summer, I was invited to a cocktail reception hosted by MomCentral and Hasbro. We got a peek at some of their new card games and then got a sheet to fill out with our choices of games we would be interested in reviewing. I never expected to get a huge box delivered with ALL of the games I picked inside!  To help you pick games that you’d like to play with your family, here’s what we received and what I think:

Monopoly City is a whole new twist on the classic Monopoly game. Instead of buying streets to put houses and hotels on, you buy districts and build residential building, industrial buildings, stadiums, and skyscrapers. In addition to charging people rent for landing on a property you own, you can also sell them a mortgage, or hold an auction for an unowned property. The Free Parking and Go to Jail spaces are still included :)

Boggle is now available in a new compact version with a built-in timer. You twist the base to make room to shake the letter cubes, then twist it back up and a timer automatically starts. There’s a scoring system with points you can award for words with a certain number of letters, or you can just play like we do, which is just to see how many words we can make.

Connect 4X4 is a totally cool new way to play the classic Connect 4 game. Instead of just one vertical grid with slots for the checkers, Connect 4×4 has TWO grids, and instead of red and black checkers, it has four colors of rings and pieces called blockers. Up to 4 people can play, and while the goal is still to get 4 in a row, here’s the twist – the 4 in a row can be in either grid. To win the game, play four-in-a-row in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line on either side of the grid, or by weaving through one side of the grid to the other. The blockers are like two checkers stuck together, and they block both grids at once!  Once you get the hang of it, it’s so fun to play. Kaitlyn actually picked up the game and carried it into her room, where she spends time just taking the rings out and dropping them back in – sorted by color.

Clue Secrets & Spies takes players into the shadowy world of Secret Agents. Agent Black is Clue’s most notorious spy, and the goal of the game is to go undercover as an international agent to foil his schemes by completing missions and attending secret meetings. Players scan meeting cards with an included ultraviolet spy light to learn the names of a secret contact, or have messages texted to their cell phones, but there’s a catch! Those texts could either help, or be a trap. It’s like no game of Clue I’ve ever played!

Candy Land Sweet Celebration Game is a sweet twist on the classic game that lets you control the length of the game, build and customize your own path, and collect treats as you play. It comes with both blue and red plastic molded pieces that you use to create each stop in the game, and instead of a fixed board, there are punch-out paths that can be rearranged as you like.  The new areas in the game are Ice Cream Harbor with ice cream tokens to collect, Snow Flake Lake with gingerbread men, Chocoslovakia with chocolate cake, and Lollipop Park with lollipops. We haven’t had a chance to sit down and really play it yet, and I predict Kaitlyn will love all the adorable little cards and characters!

BUY IT: If you want the games for tonight, I’d suggest stopping at Walmart, Kmart or Target or any other superstore that carries games. I saw several of them at Target a few days ago. Approximate retail price of each game is $14.99 to $19.99.   Visit the Family Game Night by Hasbro site to learn how to host your own Family Game Night and to see all the terrific games that Hasbro has.

WIN IT: I have three Connect 4×4 games to give away thanks to Hasbro!  To enter, leave a comment telling me the name of your favorite Habro game to play now or when you were a kid – click this link to see the complete list of Hasbro brand games.  Open to U.S. only, enter by October 7th at 12:00 PM EST.  I’ll pick three comments at random to receive Connect 4×4.

BONUS ENTRIES: I’ll give you one extra entry for each of the following that you do or have done, leave a separate comment for each:

  • Follow @MomReviews on Twitter and tweet this:  Win the new Connect 4×4 game by Hasbro from @MomReviews. 3 Winners! Enter by 10/7  http://bit.ly/h5LY0  You can do this ONCE PER DAY, leave a separate comment for each.
  • Follow @FamilyGameNight on Twitter and Retweet any of their tweets about Family Game Night or the giveaway or their games, tell them you found them through @MomReviews. This one is TODAY ONLY.
  • Subscribe to the MomReviews Feed, leave a comment telling me if you subscribe in a reader or by email
  • Link to this giveaway in a blog post or on your Facebook page, leave me your URL.  I’m still working on a MomReviews fan page :)
  • Post the MomReviews button on your blog, leave me your URL. If you have a button, I’ll add yours to my Link Love page.

Thanks for entering and good luck everybody!

Connect4x4-lores

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Ligretto – Fun Family Card Game

September 15, 2009 By

Although I occasionally indulge my kids in a toy that has no educational value whatsoever, I definitely prefer to spend our money on toys that are both educational and fun to play with. I’ve sent way too many “must have” toys to Goodwill or thrown broken bits of plastic into the trash. It’s not always easy to match a child’s age to toys for their age and level of development, which is why sites like eBeanstalk have experts to do the work for us! It’s easy to find the right learning toys for younger children and toys that older kids won’t even realize are educational!. BUT they need help from moms like me to help pick the toys.

eBeanstalk put together a team of child experts who looked at over 10,000 toys, selected the best learning toys and matched each to a stage of development. From babies through age seven, eBeanstalk has developmentally appropriate toys that are also fun! For each item on the site, the Product Features explain which skills a child of that age will typically be developing, and ways parents can use that item to help their child strengthen those skills.

I applied for and was chosen by eBeanstalk to be one of their toy tester Moms, and over the summer we received our first package. Inside was a green box containing cards for a game called “Ligretto”, a product of Playroom Entertainment. I had never heard of the game before we received it to review. If you’ve ever played Solitaire, you’ll understand the rules of Ligretto. Now, eBeanstalk doesn’t sell that game themselves, but because I have boys older than seven, they found a game meant for kids ages 8 and up. I played it with my boys who are 12 and 10 and a 10 year old friend, and we had a BLAST!

Ligretto-Green-Box

Ligretto is a card game that up to 12 players can play, AT THE SAME TIME. Each player has 10 cards in a stack with the top card up, plus three cards in a row next to that, also up. They also have cards in their hand. How many cards each player gets depends on how many sets of cards you have. Since we only had one set of cards, we had to do a lot of reshuffling. The gameplay works like this: each player looks in their stack or row for a “1″. Anyone who has one puts it face up in the center, then anyone with a “2″ puts the card on top of that, and so on. If a player doesn’t have any playable card showing, they put down cards from their hand face down and when they get to the third card, they turn that one over. When they’ve gone through their whole hand, they shuffle the hand and start again. If a player uses one of the three cards in their row, they take a card off their stack and put that in the row. The first person to get rid of all of their stack cards wins.

In this photo, you can see our cards in the middle, some are ones waiting to have a card played on them, some have been played on. On my right you can see my three “row” cards, I’m in the process of dealing everyone their ten “stack” cards.

Ligretto

Ligretto is made by Playroom Entertainment, I can’t link to their site because their database is down according to the error message I keep getting. If you type “Ligretto card game” into a search engine, you’ll find links for other sites selling the game.  I want to thank eBeanstalk for sending us such a fun game to play as a family!  I encourage you to visit eBeanstalk to check out other developmentally-appropriate toys for your kids.

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