“Because of research indicating that early language experience actually stimulates a child’s brain to grow and that reading to children gives them a huge advantage when they start school, we hope to encourage people of all ages to enjoy books and magazines and to share that pleasure with the young children in their lives.”
- GetCaughtReading.org

At MindWare, we share this passion for education and reading. In fact, we offer lots of fun, educational games that promote reading skills. But we also offer books that are just plain fun to read!

Doyle and Fossey: Drake Doyle and Nell Fossey are the sharpest science detectives in fifth grade. Follow their antics through this hilarious chapter book series! Each book features four scientific mystery stories, followed by real-life activities and experiments students can conduct on their own. (Ages 7 and up)

Mysteries of the Universe: Written by a member of Mensa, these hardcover books are jam-packed with the how’s and why’s behind some of the world’s most puzzling phenomena. (Ages 10 and up)

Meg Mackintosh Mysteries: Kids will love solving mysteries alongside savvy, diligent super sleuth Meg Mackintosh. What sets this series apart is how it reveals clues both in the entertaining text and in the illustrations, encouraging kids to pore over details and draw their own conclusions before turning the page. (Ages 7-10)

Choose Your Own Adventure: Choose Your Own Adventure books allow readers to decide on a course of action at critical junctures, determining how the story unfolds. Multiple scenarios encourage repeat reads to experience how choices impact the main characters and each story’s ultimate outcome. (Ages 9 and up)

What book will you be caught reading this month?

Plato (c. 428-348 BC) was a Greek philosopher, mathematician and writer. He founded what is said to be the first university, the Academy, in Athens, Greece.

John Locke (1632-1704) believed that education is essentially the training of character rather than simply rote instruction in knowledge—to prepare for life rather than for the university. Locke’s influential Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) began as a series of letters about education. He offered several innovative ideas about raising children, including making learning tasks more pleasurable by turning them into games.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a schoolteacher who believed that children should not have to study exclusively from texts. He created a curriculum that included journal writing (rather than just memorization and recitation) and field trips (to the countryside for nature study, as well as to the local newspaper office, gunsmith, etc.).

Anne Sullivan (1866-1936) was a teacher who, despite being visually impaired, demonstrated amazing commitment to her most well known student, Helen Keller. She developed a method of touch teaching, using direct experience rather than attempting to explain a concept, and she reasoned that children learn by imitation and repetition.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) brought the theory of knowledge out of the realm of philosophy and into a science by observing that children’s logic and modes of thinking are entirely different from those of adults; children are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.”

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, a great time to show the teachers in your life how much you appreciate all of their hard work. This is also a great opportunity to talk to your kids about school and what they like best about their classes and teachers.

Work with your kids to help them demonstrate their appreciation. Simple things can mean a lot! Here are some ideas for you and your child to show teachers your appreciation:

• Help your children create homemade cards or posters for their teachers
• Have each member of the class write a message and compile a personalized thank you book
• Talk to your child about offering to come in early, stay a little late or stay inside during a recess period to help the teacher clean and organize the classroom
• Take your child shopping for some classroom supplies and goodies. Construction paper, books, educational games and toys – whatever extras your child’s classroom needs!
• Don’t underestimate the power of a simple, “Thank you.” Hearing this message from students and parents means a lot to a teacher!

How will you show your teachers that they are appreciated?

Let's Play School Set

According to the National Summer Learning Association, “All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer.”  This means that keeping your child’s mind active over summer is just as important as keeping their body active.

But your kids don’t need to know that they are learning—just let them think they’re having fun with some of MindWare’s favorite educational toys for summer!

Bucket Blast: Up to 6 teams can run, toss, balance, chase and strategize their way through 15 fitness-friendly activities. Durable, high quality components stand up to rough and tumble play. With inside, outside and water-play options, this set has it all. Ages 6 and up.

A Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner, an Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Award winner and a Dr. Toy Top 10 Game Award winner!

Mine Shift: How can you forge ahead through the jeweled walls of the mine shaft? Shift them! Rotate a game tile a quarter turn to move the mine wall and allow your gemstone access. Or rotate tiles to prevent your opponent from moving. There are walls everywhere, but strategic miners can successfully make their way through to the other side. With 27 game board tiles, the set-ups are unlimited for a brand new game every time you play. Ages 8 and up

Mine Shift recently won the Mensa Select Award!

Crime Catchers Spy Science: Young scientists will get a taste of how real crime labs work through this hands-on experiment kit. Follow the journey of Juan and Anita, the brother-sister crime fighting duo, through two questionable crimes. From matching DNA to testing fingerprints, eight different scientific activities will help Juan and Anita pinpoint the right suspects and solve the mysteries.  Ages 8 and up.

Boochie: Toss between your legs! Toss behind your back! Who can toss their bean ball and hoop closest to the Boochie ball? Special wrist trackers provide different, outrageous throwing challenges every round. The player with the most points wins! Ages 8 and up.

An Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Best Toy Award!

For more educational toys to keep your kids busy this summer, visit MindWare.com!

The point is, invention changes the way we live—and the future holds plenty of opportunities for our kids to change the world again with their own inventions.

When you encourage your kids to be innovative and creative from a young age, you are drawing on something that comes naturally to most children: their imagination! Young children are growing and exploring, and their brains may process new stimulus in ways that adults never would have thought of.

Encouraging your children‘s fresh, unbiased outlook on the world helps to develop their innovation and creativity. Provide your child with engaging materials that allow for imaginative, open-ended play (art supplies, building blocks, etc.). Observe as they play, and don’t get too concerned if they begin to play in an unconventional way.  Instead, ask questions such as, “What do you think about this?” or “What should we do next”? or “How do we make this better?

Contraptions 200 Plank Set from MindWare

Even if your children don’t develop the world’s next great invention this month, they will be well on the way to developing critical thinking skills that will serve them throughout life!

Mine Shift: You’re the Master of Your Domain

Ever play a game that was so fun that even if you lost repeatedly, you didn’t care, you just wanted to play more?

I’m not all that cheery about losing and so I don’t think I’ve ever had this experience but you know what?  Number 1 Son has.    I can’t remember ever seeing him fall in love with a game so fast.  The game is called Mine Shift and just yesterday it was named as one of the five winners for Mensa Select 2012.

I honestly checked the box and examined the pieces up close to see what is this magnetic draw.  But if there was a secret, I couldn’t uncover it.

Actually, you don’t have to look that closely to see the signs of a great game.  There are jewels embedded inside.  No seriously, there really are pictures of pretty jewels embedded within the “walls” of the game board.  When I saw them, I instantly thought of something not present in my life: girls.

I don’t have daughters.  I am one of those women who sees girls’ clothing and become sad that I never get to purchase a pretty dress for my own child.

Despite not having any girls, I have thought a lot about their development way before I even became a mom, as I used to develop job-readiness skill-building programs to help young girls reach their potential when I worked in community-based organizations.

I even love this box. Super easy to clean up too. They even give you an extra jewel just in case you are like me and tend to lose stuff. photo: Mindware

Introducing Number 5 (No, I didn’t just have a baby)

Thinking about girls and what they need is really all I can do now since I only have boys.  But exploring how girls may experience toys differently is something worth doing as my friends have often told me that it is not easy shopping for toys for their daughters.  After attending the Toy Fair this year and seeing some very promising toys for girls, I knew I had to find some girl testers and Number 5 and her mother were willing to give it a shot.   To read more about Number 5, please click here but in short, Number 5 is a fun-loving active third grader who loves to read Harry Potter and adores her Monster High dolls.

I knew that Number 5 liked playing 2-player strategy games like chess with her dad and so after seeing those jewels and knowing her penchant for pretty things, I lent Mine Shift to Number 5.

Do you see what I see? They are so pretty! Boys can marvel and girls can be dazzled.

Girls and Boys Both Like This Strategy Game

I was so happy to hear that she not only liked Mine Shift but loved it.  She beat her mom a few times (sometimes her mom loses on purpose just to allow No. 5 some more time to try out different moves).   In our house, I had no mercy and beat No. 1, eight times in a row (games are quick) and he would still beg for another game.  I just didn’t get it.  What is so addictive?  No. 5′s experience sounded very similar.

To investigate the inner workings of this game further, I asked Susan Schwartz, MAEd, a veteran learning specialist and child development expert and Director of the Child Mind Institute‘s Learning and Diagnostics Center in New York City.   She too, played with one of her students, a 5-year-old girl and remarked how popular it was with girls.  Her first comments about the game were about the design which we both agree it looks and feels great.

"There is something nice about the way it feels in your hands," said expert child development specialist, Susan Schwartz of the board games squares and the jewels.

The Mystery Behind Mine Shift

Still, I was a dog with a bone. I felt like there was some sort of secret to this game’s success.  I never see my son get beat repeatedly and just come back for more.  Additionally, I have given several toys and games to Number 5 to test and Mine Shift was one of the games that really stood out from the crowd.   What’s in this sauce?

Susan tried to help me by bringing up the game of chess.  “The best players keep playing because they can shift their strategy.”  And this is true of Mine Shift, you can watch the video below to see how each move changes the game.  About Mine Shift, Susan continued, “And you have to keep shifting your strategy and make decisions about how you are going to turn the cards and turning the cards can turn the table on your game.”

What Susan said clarified everything for me as a mom and why I think that these two kids (Numbers 1 and 5) liked the game so much.  Simply put, Mine Shift is a game of non-stop strategic play.  Both Numbers 1 and 5 love movement and have pretty good visual-spatial skills.  You enjoy watching your opponent’s moves as much as you like envisioning your next moves and then carrying out your plan.   It’s like you are watching and playing a football game simultaneously with no breaks.  There is always movement, even if it is only in your mind.

Susan’s student also shared a similar opinion.  Being younger than the recommended age of eight, Susan had her play with just two jewels instead of four and she too was enamored of the movement.  Susan relayed her student’s comments to me, “I like the shapes that you put the cards in.  It was fabulous.  I like when you have to turn the squares.”

Searching for Skills within Mine Shift

Number 5′s mom remarked that there was some luck involved in Mine Shift because you don’t always get the same cards and this could mean that you are off to a bit of a difficult start.  I really like that. That is the one big difference between Mine Shift and other famous two-player games like Chess and Checkers in which the game board never changes.

Susan shared some good news about skill-building even if your game board changes with each game.  “You are building that storehouse of executive thinking, flexibility, planning ahead,” she said, “and you begin to develop a sensibility about the game and you can make things shift.”

I asked Susan to expand on executive skills which she explained were things like flexibility and schematic and strategic thinking.  These sound really good but this idea of executive skills is on my mind lately. (*See bottom for a great link) I often hear friends joke how they need an executive assistant because we are all so busy and not managing to get everything done.  What are we talking about when we speak of executive skills and children?Master Your Domain

“So it means that you are a master of your domain.”  She explained in terms of one having to be  organized, plan ahead, and problem solve.  She also added that these skills were useful in other ways, “in terms of thinking of alternative solutions when you are in thinking in math and science, or thinking about consequences of actions like in social studies and history.”  Wow, cool!   She also listed backpack management as an example of something that needed executive skills and my brain went on high alert.  Wait! Can we play our way to a better-packed backpack?

“If you play 100 times, you’re not going to get better at managing your backpack.”  But then, she gave the good news. “You get better at managing your backpack by practicing thinking ahead.”   And that really is good news because Mine Shift constantly challenges each player to think ahead.

Susan then taught me how to transfer those skills off the game and into your child’s life.  That is, you name those skills.   This makes sense.  When we do something well at work, we are most helped when our boss tells us what exactly we did that made her/him so happy.  Kids are no different.  They deserve to hear it too.

Susan gave me examples of things we could say, “Wow, you had to be strategic.  You had to plan.  You had to cultivate being a good executive and dividing your attention.  Let’s think about those skills when you are needing to do something else.”

Our favorite time to play 2-player games is after Number 2 goes to sleep. Number 1 will play Mine Shift with me or play chess with his dad. He loves to spin stuff. He's a Ninjago Spinjitsu fanatic.

Note to Self: Don’t Forget… It’s a Game

More significantly, this veteran learning specialist reminded me of a very important ideal that I suppose one might forget when we look at toys and games as tools for developing skills in children.  “I really want to encourage parents and children to play for play’s sake.”  She made me laugh out loud when she told me that she would really NOT want a student or even her own child to say something like, ” ‘Ugh!  What’s the consequence of this? Now you’re going to talk to me about my backpack?’”

And that is good advice indeed. I especially liked her advice on modifying the game for younger kids.  I had wanted Number 2 to get in on this game but it never occurred to me to have him start off with just one jewel.  It might have been suggested in the directions but of course, I lost them.

But lucky me, we have Susan giving good advice and my little guy, who is just five LOVED this game.  We started out with one and then have moved onto two.  He too dislikes losing but with Mine Shift, he still comes back for more.   I actually made these videos (above) after I talked to Susan and I found it difficult to try to name all the good executive skills they practiced as we played along.  I think it was because I couldn’t divide my attention which is something that Susan says is the skill of “multi-tasking.”

So what was I thinking about so much that I couldn’t manage to highlight their good “executive” decisions?   It’s shameful but you should know:  I was too busy trying to win!  So there.  I am a grown-up and I will say it.  I love this game and I have won many times against my kids and have shown little mercy.    As for our copy of Mine Shift that I lent to Number 5?  It’s back at home but I couldn’t dare take this game away from her!  You just can’t do that, especially now that it’s won the Mensa Select Award!  Woo-hoo!  A girl’s gotta have a good Mensa game, does she not?  And so do my kids, and so what can you do…..  I bought a new copy for her family so she can have another chance at beating her mom and possibly her dad next time too.

According to a study by the Children’s Hospital Medical Center of Cincinnati, 40 percent of 2-year-olds are watching a minimum of three hours of television a day. That’s three hours they could be playing outside, challenging their brain with a puzzle or bonding with mom and dad over a book!

The most concerning part of this statistic is that young children, specifically ages 2 years old and younger, are at a critical stage of brain development that requires interaction and stimulation—which television does not provide.

“Kids need to be stimulated in ways that engage them through interaction with people and books and games, and in ways that teach them creativity and allow them to be physically active.”
Dr. Daniel Broughton, pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN (ABC News)

So take the MindWare No TV Night challenge, and designate at least one night each week to be a television-free night! Instead, play a game, bake up a new recipe, read a book or put on a play. These activities will create fun family memories and build important social, physical and cognitive skills in your child.

Here are some of MindWare’s favorite educational toys for a TV-free night:

• Extreme Dot-to-Dot Puzzle Books: These books are a great activity for kids to work on their concentration, counting and mapping skills. Intricate, challenging and wildly rewarding to finish, Extreme Dot to Dot puzzles range from 500 to over 1,400 dots. Some puzzles even cover a two-page spread! For ages 8 and up.

• Dizios: Dizios is the bright, bold and brain-bending domino game with a dizzying twist! Take turns placing tiles into the grid by matching up edges, and earn points according to the pieces on the board that your tile touches. For ages 6 and up

• EzyRoller: This is a fun outdoor, physical activity for kids ages 4 and up. EzyRoller has no chains or pedals—all it takes is a simple left-right foot motion on the push bar and it glides forward, fast or slow, depending upon the left-right pace of the rider. Push harder on one side to turn; use the hand brake to stop. The patented steel frame adjusts to accommodate riders from 3′3″ to 5’5″ tall. Race your friends, or set up an obstacle course to travel through

These are just some of MindWare’s favorite educational toys for a No TV Night. There are plenty more for you to find over at MindWare.com!

Here are some of MindWare’s exclusive, best selling educational toys:

Contraptions Catapult: Kids can build their own authentic catapult with planks, a little glue and the help of easy, step-by-step instructions. Then let the fun and experimentation begin! What shoots farther, a marshmallow or a piece of macaroni? How does the object’s course change when you pull the arm back to different points? If you make the flight deck higher, how does it affect the hurl? (Ages 7 and up)

Marble Run: Build a Marble Run track that twists, turns, and spins marbles at incredible speeds! These colorful chutes, tubes, drop-throughs, merry-go-rounds and spinners stack and click, with clear pieces for extra fun. (Ages 4-10)

Friendship Bracelet Maker: My Friendship Bracelet Maker has revolutionized the time-honored tradition of bracelet exchange. Just slip a knot into the Butterfly Clip, place the threads in the string holder and begin knotting. My Friendship Bracelet Maker includes a convenient organizer for storing threads, plus 56 precut threads in 14 different colors to get kids started. (Ages 6 and up)

Forensic Science Detective’s Toolkit: Develop observation and problem-solving skills using the same equipment and techniques as real detectives. Kids get in-depth with 17 experiments that show how to locate and handle evidence, test for counterfeit currency, analyze hair and soil samples, secure fingerprints and footprints and create a crime scene report complete with sketches.  (Ages 8 and up)

Check out MindWare’s other best selling educational toys!

The Thesaurus has proven to be a valuable resource for students, writers and anyone else who wants to improve their communication skills. If it’s been awhile since you cracked open a Thesaurus, today would be the day to re-familiarize yourself! The Thesaurus lists synonyms (words with the same or similar meaning) for words to help you avoid repetition in writing and speeches.  It also lists antonyms (words with opposite meaning), to help you make sure you are using the right word with the right meaning.

So next time you are working on a paper or speech, whether it is for school, work or just for fun, be sure to utilize the power of the Thesaurus! If you don’t have a hard copy of the book in your house, you can always visit Thesaurus.com.

You can also help your child further develop their reading and writing skills with other educational games. Some of MindWare’s favorite educational games for reading and writing include:

• Word Winks: Everyone loves these visual wordplay puzzles, where a common phrase or expression is represented by illustrated words. Each book contains 300 brain-twisters. (Ages 10 and up)
• Word Roots: Word Roots teaches the meanings of Latin prefixes, roots and suffixes commonly used in English. Learning word elements dramatically improves spelling and the ability to decode unfamiliar words. (Ages 9 and up)
• Choose Your Own Adventure Books: Choose Your Own Adventure books allow readers to decide on a course of action at critical junctures, determining how the story unfolds. Multiple scenarios encourage repeat reads to experience how choices impact the main characters and each story’s ultimate outcome. (Ages 9 and up)

You can find other education games that promote critical reading skills on MindWare.com.

We hope you have a wonderful (or amazing, or sensational, or terrific!) Thesaurus Day!

The federal holiday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was first observed in 1986, but in 1994 Congress designated the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday as a national day of service. In fact, the MLK Day of Service is the only federal holiday observed as a national day of service – think of it more as a “day on, not a day off.”

The MLK Day of Service is a part of United We Serve, the President’s national call to service initiative. It calls for Americans of all ages, abilities and walks of life to work together to provide solutions to our most pressing national problems.

If you read our post last year on the significance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, you know that Dr. King believed in a nation of freedom and justice, and encouraged all citizens to apply the principles of nonviolence to their everyday lives to make this country a better place to live.

So how can you and your family get involved in a service project on the MLK Day of Service? Just click on this link to “Find a Project” in your area!

Encouraging service within your family doesn’t have to wait until the MLK Day of Service. Your family can volunteer with local non-profits in your area, or you can simply do little random acts of kindness throughout the week. How do you promote service within your family?