The Strong Museum has a new exhibit called ‘Game Time!’ It chronicles the games and toys people played with throughout three centuries of American history. The interactive children’s museum exhibit allows visitors to move around like a piece on a giant game board, play with oversized toy props, and see historic items from the game and puzzle collections. The focus of the exhibit is family oriented, active and hands-on. Visitors will be able to track the history of games through a multimedia timeline. It showcases historic artifacts, photographs, advertisements, and...

The Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit partnership of educators and health professionals, released a report titled ‘Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why children need to play in schools.’ It argues that education in kindergarten has changed drastically. It has become overly focused on academics and test preparation. As a result, active play time has diminished and children no longer have the opportunity to learn through play and exploration. Studies have shown the vital importance of play in young children’s development. Children who engage in play have greater language skills, better social...

The National Institute for Play is a nonprofit corporation whose mission is to raise awareness of the benefits of play to public life. It promotes research on the subject of play and seeks to expand the scientific knowledge of human play. The National Institute for Play aims to provide resources for society so that every member can take advantage of the boons offered by play. The nonprofit was founded by Dr. Stuart Brown. His first foray into the impact of play was through the study of a group of homicidal...

Speaking as fathers themselves, the team behind educational building toy company Click-A-Brick say they are thrilled that more states are initiating a Dads Take Your Child to School Day, which is meant to encourage fathers to get more involved in their children’s education and other activities. According to a recent Yahoo Parenting article, Florida is the most recent state to adopt the initiative, along with New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois. Each school that has a Dads Take Your Child to School Day does it a bit differently, but...

The team at Click-A-Brick loves the concept behind the Bricks 4 Kidz franchise model, saying the use of building blocks to teach children science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills is a great idea and shows the versatility and importance of these classic toys. A recent Associated Press article that appeared on the Laboratory Equipment website outlined how elementary school kids in Yakima, WA used building blocks -- some of which included motorized pieces -- and basic computer coding to build a seesaw to learn about inertia, force and equal...

The retailer Target announced on August 7, 2015, via a statement on its corporate web site that it will remove gender based labeling in certain departments. These departments include toys, bedding and entertainment. The decision was made after receiving feedback and suggestions from customers. The retailer aims to avoid having guests and families feel frustrated or limited by the way things are presented. Signs that offer product suggestions like apparel, where there are fit and sizing differences, will still exist. However, in other departments like Toys, Home or Entertainment, these...

The team at learning toy company Click-A-Brick applauds a new study by the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center that has found reading to young children stimulates language processing development in their brains, saying it shows the importance of this particular child-parent interaction for kids. Published in the journal Pediatrics, the study, performed by Dr. John S. Hutton and colleagues, found that reading exposure in children aged three to five years old stimulated neural activity in the portion of the brain involved with acoustic, phonological and semantic language processing. Click-A-Brick Co-Founders...

The team at educational toy company Click-A-Brick say Hannah Sage’s Milo the lion toy, which she specifically designed for children of deployed military parents, fills a gap in the market and hopes it sparks the creation of a niche market for these types of toys. Sage, a toy inventor in the United Kingdom, designed Milo as a way for families to communicate throughout a parent’s deployment. It comes with 24 tokens, which represent each week of a six-month deployment. Each week, a token is hidden somewhere in the family home...

The team behind building toy Click-A-Brick says they are pleased to read one Dallas, TX mom blogger’s idea for encouraging natural development in her son while simultaneously cutting down on the amount of clutter in his room and discouraging mess making with toys. In a post entitled ‘Why I Got Rid of the Toys’ published on the Dallas Moms Blog near the beginning of summer, Denaye Barahona says she was inspired by her son’s neighborhood playgroup, which is run out of a Montessori school. Rather than just having toy boxes...

The team behind learning toy Click-A-Brick says they are ecstatic about a new report that says the first half of 2015 was marked by strong sales growth for the toy industry in the United States and predicts an even stronger finish to the year. According to market research company The NPD Group, the US toy industry grew by 6.5 percent in the first half of 2015, or roughly $400 million. Because 34 percent of toy sales have occurred in the first half of the year over the past four years,...