What are the most-wanted toys on kids’ holiday gift lists for 2011? Best to ask the experts — the kids themselves!

And that’s just what The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis does to produce its annual Top 10 list of kid-tested, kid-approved toys.

Each fall, the museum store invites children to test the newest toys, then vote on their favourites for the upcoming holiday season.

Can you begin to imagine how much fun that would be for the staff? I’m so jealous. :)

Here is the list of this year’s winners — I’ve sorted them by recommended age group — all available from The Children’s Museum Store or online:

• Barbie “Jam with Me” Rock Star Guitar (Ages 3+)
  Jam with Barbie with this toy electric guitar. Connect your MP3 player to jam along with your own tunes, take the guitar challenge and play along with Barbie, or just freeplay to create your own awesome songs!
  $39.95

• Water Wizard (Ages 3+)
  The water wizard lets you draw and create over and over again using only water! As the screen dries the images disappear leaving it ready for another amazing creation.
  $19.95

• Barbie Giant Activity Floor Pad (Ages 3+)
  This complete activity set includes crayons, marker, paints, paintbrush, scissors and gluestick along with 40 fun fashion activities!
  $14.95

• Flying Turtle (Ages 3-12)
  The best toy for active play, kids have a blast zipping around on the flying turtle! But since it is entirely kid powered, they get a ton of great exercise at the same time!
  $79.95

• Playmobil Pirates Prison with Ship (Ages 4+)
  This fun Pirate themed set from Playmobil includes large pirate ship, small row boat, island, prison, and all the people and accessories you need to create an amazing imaginary world.
  $59.95

• Darda Fireball Climb (Ages 4+)
  The World’s Fastest Motorized Cars! This race car and track set is completely kid powered! No batteries or electricity required. Just wind the car and watch it zip through the loops and twists!
  $39.95

• OgoBild Pod (Ages 6+)
  A brilliant combination of active and constructive play. Ogo Bild Pods lets your child build giant structures like bouncing balls and forts.
  $39.95

• Perplexus Original (Ages 6+)
  Perplexus Original is a bendy, trendy, can’t put it down challenge! With plenty of twists, turns, and barriers between start and finish, this puzzle ball will leave you perplexed!
  $24.95

• Laser Pegs 3D Lite Board (Ages 7+)
  This is the Ultimate Laser Pegs Kit – the world’s only lighted construction set! The 3D Lite Board gives you 40 power connectors on one board so you can build anything you can imagine.
  $85.95

• FyrFlyz (Ages 8+)
  Create amazing light shows by spinning, swinging and twirling your FyrFlyz.
  $11.95

Adults in need of holiday gift ideas for the children in their lives can make purchases from the Kid-Tested, Kid-Approved list and The Museum Store holiday toy catalogue both in the store or online at www.childrensmuseum.org/kid-tested.

What I like about most of the toys on this list — and most of the toys you’ll find carried by most museum gift shops, come to that — is that they’re both fun and educational, and especially good for stimulating the creativity of young minds. And most of the toys on this list would be fun for siblings to play with together, even where there are a couple of years between the kids in age.

Also very cool for parents’ on-going expenses, a number of these items are totally kid-powered and run on imagination — no batteries required — like that awesome Darda Fireball Climb race track!

Of course I’d love to see a most-wanted toy list where and fewer of the toys that are pointed at a particular gender (I’m looking at you, Barbie!). A losing battle, there, do you think? Okay, okay, the politically-correct Grinch is moving on…

Stay tuned for more great out of the ordinary gift ideas for kids — and for us big kids, too!

I saw a promo for this SpongeBob SquarePants camera on a CNet video round-up of new tech toys, and the guy had it hanging around his neck on a cord.

Hey, I thought, who couldn’t use a camera on a cord (less fumbling for a camera in a pocket, for those spur-of-the-moment candid shots)?

But I’ve looked and looked and looked, and I don’t see a cord mentioned anywhere in the specs or ads.
Disappointment!

More second thoughts — a bright yellow camera in the form of a cartoon character might be a bit noticeable to pull off the truly subtle snapping of blackmail-worthy pics.

And there’s nothing subtle at all about the shutter sound-effects that come with — you get to pick your choice to suit the mood: Marimba, Ukulele, Foghorn blast, or Seagulls squawking their heads off.

On the plus side, there’s the fun of slipping off SpongeBob’s pants when you want to reveal the USB thingie, to plug in and download your photographs to computer.

It takes photos up to 640 x 480, which is plenty good enough for the aforementioned candid snaps you might want to embarrass folks with on Facebook or your blog. (“You’ll do my weekend shift for me, George, won’t you? Oh, lookee-lookee who ol’ SpongeBob saw together at the club last night!”) Not that we would. Ever.

But, c’mon, it’s SpongeBob.

And the camera’s cheap enough for butterfingers like me — which means the price is not out of line for kids, if you yourself are more into the suave DSLR sort of thing. Running $26 at Amazon, with some serious discounts — even some that are under $10 — from third-party vendors…

Sadly, however, Memorex is only shipping its SpongeBob SquarePants to customers in the US at the moment.

And no, Hello Kitty is not a fair substitute!

If someone on your “social obligations” Christmas gift list has a little girl… and that little girl is a fan of Hannah Montana… but, truth be told, you really don’t like her parents all that much… here’s the perfect (slightly evil) gift.

For about ten bucks, you can pick up a singing Hannah Montana collector doll.

She comes with a snazzy outfit that the kid can put on and take off her until it falls apart, a doll display stand that someone’s bound to step on, and a delightfully tacky Hannah Montana “keepsake” in a convincing gift box.

Apparently, batteries actually are included, too!

But don’t let that fool you — this toy has genuine potential to ruin a parent’s holiday.

Because the Hannah Montana doll only knows one tune — she’ll sing Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree until every adult in the house wants to smash the doll with a case of Tylenol bottles.

How perfect is that?

Delight the child.
Annoy the parents.
And most likely get yourself off the hook for giving anything to that particular family next year!

Really, it’s the next best thing to giving the kid a drum kit for Christmas…

So, you want your kid to have a bedroom that’s decorated to match his dreams — but you don’t want to spend much money?

Sensible!

Especially if the kiddy’s wished-for bedroom decor is based on the latest from Disney or Pixar or whatever video game is hot in the school yard this week…

What to do?
Well, here’s one incredibly frugal solution to that decorating dilemma…

Block Posters lets you send any image from your computer (up to 1 MB size file), slice it up, print it out, and turn it into a giant wall poster — free!

Check the gallery of other people’s posters (like the lovely Nemo wall art that Phil made for his young daughter’s bedroom) for inspiring ideas like these:

• Leave the white edges of the paper on for a cool tile mosaic effect;
• Decoupage the pieces onto a room divider screen;
• Frame each paper tile separately in black and hang them really close together to look like a piece of stained glass;
• Go black-and-white or monchrome for an high-toned artsy look;
• Blow up a smaller image for a cool blocky pixelated effect (turn a nature shot into modern camouflage, anyone?);
• Posterize yourself!

Okay, maybe your children don’t really want your face looming down at them from the wall above their beds while they’re sleeping at night… but you could do a nice family portrait, or a favourite pop star, or a role-model athlete, or even a screenshot from a favourite game…

Your imagination is the only limit!

Or, to be factual, about 8 feet x 10 feet is the limit, finished poster size-wise.
But you don’t really need a larger poster than that, do you? Unless you’re making a mural to decorate a great room… hmm….

I’ve just been introduced to an interesting little company called Five Humans. Besides having a great name going for them, they’ve got a great mission statement, the “self appointed task of curing ignorance through hip, fashionable clothing.

Basically, Five Humans creates high-quality t-shirts that help you to raise awareness for a cause that’s important to you and your family — like the plight of autistic children, or cancer, diabetes, asthma, heart disease…

Cool Mom Picks says it best:

“When there’s a cause near and dear to my heart, I have no problems letting my child’s chest be a billboard for raising awareness.”

No kid? No worries — T-shirts from Five Humans come in adult sizes, so grown-up men and women can be useful and fashionable billboards for a good cause, too.

Autism, apparently, is the fastest growing developmental disorder in the US (and I’d suspect that there’s a similar stat for other first-world countries). Who knew?

Yet, most of us do know someone whose life is affected in some way by autism — or at the very least have heard news stories of low-income parents who can’t afford the special training and early intervention that’s needed for autistic children. There is no cure for autism, but that doesn’t mean there’s no hope: as cause-related t-shirts serve to remind us, ignorance is a curable disease.

Arts and Crafts

This was a spur-of-the-moment craft project, instigated by my young friend Kelly (who was spending March break with her grandmother, our next-door neighbour) and carried out on a stormy evening when our other entertainment options were limited.

Remember the Bendy Holdy Wondervase? If you’ve got a pair of them, you’ve got great fun! Kelly had had her heart set on playing with those flexible vases from the moment she laid eyes on them, so of course that was the very first project we had to do!

And what’s a vase without some flowers?

They’re a bit of a tough job, these flowers, since we didn’t have much in the way of materials — Kelly glued together popsicle sticks and painted them green to make the stems, for instance — but hey, we had fun doing it!

One of the tissue-paper flowers — the white one printed with tiny red hearts — went home with Kelly as a gift for her Grammie, because grandmother’s have a deep appreciation for such things.

Granny Squares

What can I say? For the better part of a year, I’ve been griping about the sad state of the throw pillows on the couch.

Scraps of yarn, a couple of crochet hooks, and an eager young helper with a week’s break from school… and now I’ve got plenty of “granny squares” to fashion into cushion covers!

Healthy Exercise with Dogs

The long-faced greyhound — who can’t get out to his running yard, with all that snow, enjoyed a Novice class in Rally Obedience. (That’s a dog sport that involves high-speed obedience moves around a timed course: great fun! You can learn more about it at RallyObedience.com.)

And when the weather wasn’t too bad outside, we had some doggie visitors… and some lovely brisk walks on snowy trails, coming back home to cinnamon buns and hot chocolate.

…and Nature Appreciation

Because winter in Atlantic Canada may last just a teensy bit longer than we’d really prefer… but, still, it does have its moments!

Game Design: Exploring Creativity with Children

Monopoly Rules

I remember playing Monopoly with my dad.

He taught me many things about wheeling and dealing.

Whenever he purchased Boardwalk, he would ceremoniously place the card into his shirt pocket, symbolically telling me that I would NEVER get it. Mostly, I remember that he would nearly always win.

Yet, my fondest memories are of his creation of a game called Card Monopoly.

He made it with a deck of cards and two record album covers slit open and taped together. The rules were simple, requiring only a second deck of cards, two dice and a couple of tokens. We played quite a few games of Card Monopoly.

I remember thinking that my dad was a genius to be able to invent a game.

Zillions of Games

Dad went on to create many more games, including a computer word game! He instilled in me a love for making games. He also tempered my competitive nature.

Now, as a father, it’s my turn.

With five children, the fun is amplified. We have made up games as one group. We have made games for each other as Christmas presents. We have done solo efforts and used each other as play testers…

So, how did all this come about?

Come take a trip back in time, when the children were young and impressionable…

Inspiration

Where did our game ideas originate? It may be cliché to say that inspiration comes from everywhere but, for us, that was pretty close to the truth.

BEDTIME STORIES

The first games we ever made up were bedtime story adventures. I invented dungeons and forests through which the kids traveled as a team. Each child had opportunities to change the course of the story:

The bedtime stories were so much fun that we began playing them during the day. We would sit in the living room and spin wild, fanciful tales of treasure hunts, quests and spelunking (caves are great settings for game stories!)

EXISTING GAMES

My wife and I spent a lot of time choosing fun, family-oriented games that would appeal to most of us. While my older sons and I enjoyed competitive games, my wife, daughter and youngest son were more laid back. Sure, they would get into the spirit of the moment, but for them, it was not an all-consuming affair. It was rare to find the perfect game.

Our short-list included:

• Liar’s Dice
• Stacker
• Boom-o
• Boggle (no scoring)

When we created new games from existing games, we either changed the rules or we combined two or more games into one mega-game!

MASS MEDIA

PC games, fiction, sitcoms, cartoons and movies have all played a role in inspiring us. All five kids have collaborated on creating a town populated with television characters lovingly drawn on the backs of my old business cards. The town is on a poster board, complete with a mall. I have no clue about the game, but I hear constant laughter coming from their bedroom as they play-act their way through this adult-free world.

SCHOOL SUBJECTS

As Homeschoolers, whenever my wife an I introduced topics to our kids, we either supplemented them with computer games (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Zoombini’s Logical Adventure, etc.) or we created our own. One such creation was Chemistrivia. As you can imagine, it was designed to test knowledge of basic chemistry.

Guiding Theme

I think it is critical to recognize the elements that make a game fun for children.

Kids don’t always tell you how they feel, but it’s pretty easy to detect boredom and frustration. Getting trounced by big people is no fun for junior — although apparently, it’s okay for him to dance all over our vanquished ruins.

Having one daughter and four sons sitting around the table, I’m keenly aware of gender stereotypes.

Finally, I realize that sometimes, sibling rivalry intrudes on the game, making Sheldon, the oldest, disproportionately targeted for all the evil cards and whammies.

On a positive note, I have learned that Dominique displays the best lateral-thinking skills; Evan is the most analytical and enjoys numbers; Kayla — like her grandpop — drives a hard bargain and can be quite sneaky; Sheldon exploits all the loopholes in the rules; Ryan loves to play, as long as he can sit on mom’s lap and help her.

By minimizing or eliminating the potentially unattractive parts of games, we have a handle on the “fun bits.”

Going back to our sources of inspiration, I looked for ideas that either minimized competition to the most trivial level, or fostered team play. Here are just two examples of each theme ideal.

Trivial Pursuit of Happyness

Scrap Paper Game exemplifies trivial competition. By making the acquisition less important than the surrounding activity, we created a game that was fun for a six year-old as well as a fourteen year-old.

With nothing more than pencils and six pieces of scrap paper per player, we each drew one animal per scrap, assigned it a value from one to six, and wrote that value down. We also wrote down their natural habitat. We arbitrarily ranked the habitats (Ocean-dwellers were stronger than Desert animals).

Then, we simply played out each animal, one round at a time, with the “strongest” animal collecting the rest of the critters.

At the end of the game, whoever had the most points got to draw a new animal with even more points. The rest of us got to draw weaker animals to add to our collection.

Then, we’d start all over again!

The Civil Board Game

Gem City was all about cooperative play.

We had to mine precious gems for a despotic king and his high-maintenance queen, while keeping the city running as efficiently as possible.

Each player was elected to a government position and made proposals that only got enacted if the majority voted in favor of them. With civil positions having conflicting agendas, a lesson in petty politics awaited my unsuspecting children!

I went all out on the construction of the game board, using spray paint for the river, forest and desert, sandpaper strips for dirt roads, and duct tape wrapped around cardboard strips to represent paved roads.

We bought some beads from the dollar store and these became gold, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. We borrowed the figures from RISK®. These became various citizens in the King’s realm. Other, one-of-kind remnants were used as props. Railroad tracks, mines and warehouses all came from whatever was lying around the house.

Although I built the city, the kids helped define the rules of play.

A regular deck of cards controlled the actions during the game. If one of the four Queens was drawn, we got a holiday, but she got all of the sapphires! If one of the four Kings was drawn, we had to pay taxes. Other cards controlled the growth of the population, work production, and the number of guards at the mines. The game was over when all four Kings were drawn.

The heart of the game was managing the city.

Each child had his or her own idea of the best way to accomplish various objectives.

Teaching the kids the art of wheeling and dealing brought me full circle.

Now it’s their turn.

Mitchell Allen and his family own Morpho Designs, a website design company. Sheldon Allen owns GameDev Guru, an active recruiting site for game software developers.

Technorati Tags: games, children, creativity

The seven boys and their coach’s wife died in a highway accident on their way home from a basketball game on the weekend — just minutes away from their hometown of Bathurst, New Brunswick. Today, schools and families all across Canada pay their respects as thousands attended the funeral for the seven lost members of the team known as The Boys in Red.

There have been some amazing tributes…

The news of the accident hit our region hard and deep. How could it not? So many of our children travel the snowy roads every weekend to attend sporting events… and these boys were so close to being safe at home…

Can the way you shape your family’s Christmas traditions help your kids to avoid those adult diet pitfalls? Our favourite guest foodie, Guilherme Zo’C, thinks so — and he makes a compelling point about the role of food in our holiday memories. ~ Jen

Start a Healthy New Holiday Tradition

How your Christmas celebrations can help your children to succeed with their New Year’s resolutions

Christmas is upon us and at this time of the year we are often full of the fondest memories of childhood, of simpler times, of delicious Christmas feasts, of a time where, for most people there was no concern about the weight. But also these days, in some cultures, it is time to see that another year has passed and maybe it’s time to include, once again, lose weight into the New Year’s resolutions list.

I have seen, time and again, people who are on some kind of weight control make a break during Christmas celebrations because, in theory, it is too hard not to abuse of food on Christmas. Christmas is this time of the year when all should seem magical and effortless but requires us a lot of effort to do it so.

Going through Christmas without food abuse seems a complete betrayal of our childhood memories, and we must sacrifice something to honor them. After all, this kind of memories help us to hang on when difficult times arise along the year and they deserve to be as special as they can.

The taste of food is strongly cultural, you learn to like food as you grow. That is clearly visible when you see how cuisines can be easily classified by geographical criteria, and how the taste of a culture is often linked to products available in the region: naturals as well as industrialized.

The very fact that Christmas food remains the same year after year is proof of that. There is no reason why some food is better on a certain day of the year, other than a cultural one.

Now, what if our fondest Christmas memories were linked to healthy food and healthy habits in healthy amounts? Probably it would be those habits that would help us overcome the difficulties along the year, and maybe we would reach New Year’s Eve without having weight-loss as a challenge for the following year.

Even if it seems impossible to change old habits and seems that is too late for us, the old ones, it is just the perfect time for those who are children today and will have healthier memories in their future. And because food taste is strongly cultural, there is no reason why a healthy Christmas feast can’t be delicious.

Guilherme is a Web Designer and works freelance in northern Italy.

He is happily married to Anna, and in his free time he enjoys cinema, traveling, cooking and eating.

Blending Mid-century American Modern with Scandinavian Modern, Nurseryworks line of contemporary furniture for children can move easily from the nursery to fit in with adult decor as the child grows. New to the line is a Mini version of the Sleepytime Rocker, just 19 inches, to tuck into a cosy corner.

Like the standard size Sleepytime Rocker, the full-back upholstered rocking chair comes in a choice of upholstery fabrics include cotton canvas, cotton duck, wool/polyester felt, polyester microsuede, polyester microterry, and cotton twill — in a range of colours from alabaster to lime to sky to the sophisticated dark mocha shown here. Pair it with a matching Perch Stool for convenient extra seating that can double as an ottoman. Both by lawson-fenning for nurseryworks.

Nurseryworks furniture for infants and children is as safe as it is stylish, using only formaldehyde-free dyes and low-VOC finishes, lacquers, and glues. The products are tested to US governmental standards on a quarterly basis and are certified by the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association.

Technorati Tags: nursery, furniture, contemporary, children

One other thing I should have added to the long list of Thanksgiving weekend fun — arts and crafts with autumn leaves!

Kelly (aged 11, my next-door neighbour’s granddaughter, visiting from out of town) came over on Thanksgiving Sunday afternoon — as she often does, when spending the weekend at her Grammie’s house.

(And by the way, that’s a pleasure for which I am indeed very thankful.)

We walked with dogs down to the bottom of the hill, collecting great armloads of colourful maple leaves on the way, then came home and folded them into a bouquet of faux roses.

Kelly took this bouquet home to her grandmother.

We went out the next day to get some even better leaves — bright red maple leaves, from down by the brook where this summer’s drought hadn’t robbed the trees of the stronger hues — so she could make more flowers to take to her art teacher when school went back in.

I also printed out the pictures from the maple leaf roses tutorial I’d found, and put the pages into an old binder that was lying around. Kelly is going to decorate the cover of the binder and put her name on it. We’ll use this binder to compile a How-To Book of all the activities we do together on her visits, and I like to think that she’ll share it with friends… and maybe, some day in the far future, with children of her own.

Designed to be decorated, this sturdy white cardboard playhouse is easy to assemble and folds flat to store away between play dates. It’s 100% recycled material, 100% biodegradable, and a portion of the proceeds go to UNICEF.

$49 at Modernseed.