Discovery Toys prepare your child

Learning through play is the hallmark of Discovery Toys. Recently I've written about the FIRST Robotics challenge that my son, a former Discovery Toys child, participated in. What he learned from playing with toys like Marbleworks .... gravity, balance, basic physics, logic ... all came into play when strategizing how to build his team's robot to effectively "kick" a soccer ball into a goal. Where to locate the camera, where to position the kicker, what angle to have when aiming the ball, were just some of the hundreds of decisions that needed to be made. That is the same type of thinking, albeit on a more junior scale, that will go into building a better Marbleworks structure. Today's Discovery Toys kids may be tomorrow's FIRST competitors, and those are the kids who will be our future braintrust.

Discovery Toys opportunity comes to Chicago

Chicago Opportunity Blitz! Join our team April 21-26th

Discovery Toys, the foremost direct sales / network marketer of educational toys, is offering an opportunity for those passionate about children and education and a desire for extra income. The goal: to help parents help their children learn through play, and help parents, grandparents, and teachers supplement their current income or even start a new career.

We are going to be in Chicago from Wednesday April 21st until Monday the 26th. The purpose of our trip is to grow the Chicago area Discovery Toys team. We'll be exhibiting our products and marketing materials in a swank Oak Brook hotel. Easy access and parking for everyone.

Advance RSVP required: email Billie -- billietoy@gmail.com
Please email for additional details.

ALL YOU HAVE TO DO
Who do you know in the Chicago area who you think might be interested in a fabulous home based business they can do around their family's needs? Contact them and invite them to attend or give us their info and we'll do it for you.

OUR PART
You may have your prospects contact us directly, if you prefer, or we would be happy to contact them, answer any questions and invite them to our showing. When they decide to join, they will, of course, become YOUR team member. We are sharing this with all of you because if you have any connections with people in the Chicago area who might consider joining Discovery Toys, please let us know! We have teamed up with Sherre B. (longtime leader in our family from Chicago) and are available to meet and greet, show prospects our fabulous toys, answer any questions--and schedule Success Start trainings for those who are ready to go.

We will schedule a time all day Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday morning that is convenient for them.

THE BACK STORY
We started brainstorming about building up the Chicago area -- especially with the Discovery Toys Convention being in Chicago this summer. This is an area that has supported many huge organizations in the past and is ripe for growing. The opportunity to "success start" a lot of folks this spring and early summer who could then quantum leap their business by attending Convention in their backyard just made sense!

We are really excited about this trip! We hope to hear from you so we can help you build your teams. Call your Chicago area prospects today!

Seth Berg, FIRST Dean's Award Winner

On Feb. 27 I told you about the local FIRST international robotics competition that outstanding math and science students from the New York area were participating in. Yesterday, the championships were underway at Atlanta's Georgia Dome.

My son's team mate and the president of engineering for the Stuyvesant High School team, Seth Berg, was honored by Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, along with 9 other students from FIRST for being an exemplary student. His team writes, "The award is given to students who are '...examples of student leaders who have led their teams and communities to increased awareness for FIRST and its mission.'

"Seth has done an incredible job leading the team for the past two years and the team could not be more proud of all he's done and the recognition he received today. Because of the award, our team will have reduced registration fees for one regional next year. In addition, Seth gained the team some air time on news channel NY1 which can be found here:

http://www.ny1.com/1-all-boroughs-news-content/top_stories/117066/city-students-face-off-in-national-robotics-competition "

If you're in Atlanta, come on out to the Georgia Dome today and tomorrow for more qualifying matches and award ceremonies. Stuyvesant High is still in the running for the Chairman's and Engineering Inspiration awards. Come cheer them on. Free and open to the public!!

Go 694!

Kids in the Kitchen

Brenda Thompson, in her column Kids in the Kitchen, suggests activities that little ones, beginning at age 1, can perform as mama's helpers in the cooking department.

What she fails to mention is how Discovery Toys Measure Up Cups, fit into your plans. They're a set of twelve cups, with the largest being an 8 oz. measure-- "1 cup" in your recipes. You can teach your child math skills as you measure out your ingredients....a half a cup, will be cup #6, half the size of the #12 cup, and so on. There are also toy Measure Up Pots and Spoons, and Measure Up Balance, a real scale for measuring solid and liquid weights. (Good in Science class, too!)

If you're mixing up a batch of cookie dough, remember to use Place & Trace puzzles, which double as cookie cutters for fun-time dinosaur- and bicycle-shaped cookies.

Discovery Toys enrollment now online

It's official! You can now sign up online to be a Discovery Toys consultant! We're going paperless, and streamlining the process for you. Feel free to ask me about joining; you may have questions before you "sign on the dotted line."

"Never fear...

spoiling children by making them too happy.
Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow."
~~Thomas Bray (1656-1730), English clergyman & philanthropist

"The darn trouble with cleaning the house is...

... it gets dirty the next day anyway, so skip a week if you have to. The children are the most important thing.”
~~Barbara Bush, First Lady

"True Teachers Are...

... those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own."
--Nikos Kazantzakis, poet and novelist (1883-1957)

Literacy in the early years

Literacy includes reading, speaking, and writing.

At the Frederick Douglass Elementary School in Philadelphia (where 89% of the school qualifies for reduced or free lunch) college students from Temple University's Speech-Language program mentor underprivileged kindergartners and first graders in reading skills in an after school program. Research has shown that the poorest groups also have poor results in literacy, causing high drop out and unemployment rates, in addition to poor health.

The "Kids Write and Create Program," developed in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Temple, is attempting to turn this problem around. They know that children who do not read at grade level by the end of first grade are unlikely to ever catch up, hence the focus on the youngest students.

The above article also points out the need for children to have materials that span the various learning styles: auditory, kinesthetic and visual, particularly because at the youngest ages they don't yet have the ability to translate the spoken word to the written word.

Discovery Toys can truly make a difference in this population. Not only are there fun games like AB Seas that bring fish and the alphabet to life in a lively fishing game, and CDs like Sounds Like Learning that includes songs of the alphabet, opposites and manners, or The Big Hungry Bear book and companion CD (with a narrated version of the book on it) but there's also a sequencing, storytelling game that asks the child to put sentences into the proper order.

Please contact me at billietoy"at"gmail.com if you know of grants that will provide these types of products for kids in need.

Dean Kamen on kids

In yesterday's blog entry, I gave a link to an amazing interview Anderson Cooper did earlier this year with Dean Kamen, an inventor and the founder of the FIRST robotics competitions. 13 minutes into the interview, he has this to say,

"There's no stimulus package that this country can possibly put together that will have a better return than stimulating the next generation of kids in this country to be for the 21st century our Thomas Edison, Orville and Wilbur Wright, the Google boys."

Can you see why Discovery Toys hold such a special place in my heart? How can a child get a better start in math and science than playing with building blocks or manipulatives like Giant Pegboard, Marbleworks, Measure Up Cups or math games like Think it Through tiles?

NYC FIRST Competition

Because I'm a proud mama of a child raised on Discovery Toys, I am happy to announce his participation in his school's Robotics team, Stuy 694, at the 10th anniversary of New York City FIRST!

Learn more about FIRST and how it impacts kids interested in technology, math and science, and hear what Dean Kamen told Anderson Cooper on AC360 about innovation. You can also see what PBS Newshour had to say about FIRST.

You can be part of the biggest celebration of its kind in New York City - four major student technology events under one roof. New York City FIRST's Mega Celebration is the biggest FIRST event in the world, second only to the FIRST World Championship at the Georgia Dome, in Atlanta.

Join us in celebrating our City's kids working smart in science and technology. Help inspire young men and women to go on to further studies and careers in science and technology.

This event is free and open to the public.

2010 New York City FIRST Mega-Celebration

Celebrating young men and women
working smart in
science and technology

Saturday, March 13 and Sunday, March 14
9:00am to 4:00pm

Jacob Javits Convention Center
New York, NY

NYC FIRST Robotics Competition
Saturday, March 13 & Sunday, March 14

Sixty-four competing high school robotics teams of future technologists and entrepreneurs.

NYC FIRST LEGO League Championship
Sunday, March 14
Eighty middle school teams, exploring alternative transportation systems selected from among 220 winning teams from across the City.

NYC FIRST Tech Challenge Championship
Saturday, March 13
Forty-eight high school robotics teams putting their technical and teamwork skills to the test.

NYC FIRST
Science & Technology Career Expo
Friday, March 12, through Sunday March 14
Fifty exhibitors, including colleges and universities and NYC FIRST sponsors informing students about careers in science and technology.

MAJOR SPONSORS:
(as of February 24, 2010)

Platinum
Bloomberg
Credit Suisse
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs employees

Gold
Con Edison
Google
Hearst Foundations
JPMorgan Chase
Two Sigma Investments

Silver
Michael Dubno
Johnson & Johnson
Newman's Own
NYSE Foundation
Milgo Bufkin
Port Authority of NY & NJ
Josh & Judy Weston

Bronze
Ackman Family Foundation
Bezos Family Foundation
David L. Klein Jr., Foundation
Jerry Callaghan
NASA
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Novartis Pharmaceutical Corp.
Pershing Square Foundation
Polytechnic Institute of NYU

Fresh Air Fund

"We made s'mores and hot dogs over the fire. I've never cooked outside before!"

Fresh Air children are boys and girls, six to 18 years old, who live in New York City. Children on first-time visits are six to 12 years old and stay for either one or two weeks. Youngsters who are re-invited by the same family may continue with The Fund through age 18, and many enjoy longer summertime visits, year after year. A visit to the home of a warm and loving volunteer host family can make all the difference in the world to an inner-city child. All it takes to create lifelong memories is laughing in the sunshine and making new friends.

The majority of Fresh Air children are from low-income communities. These are often families without the resources to send their children on summer vacations. Most inner-city youngsters grow up in towering apartment buildings without large, open outdoor play spaces. Concrete playgrounds cannot replace the freedom of running barefoot through the grass or riding bikes down country lanes.

Fresh Air children are registered by more than 90 participating social service and community organizations located in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the five boroughs of New York City. These community-based agencies are in close contact with children in need of summer experiences in rural and suburban areas. Each agency is responsible for registering children for the program.

What do Fresh Air children enjoy?
Playing in the backyard
Laughing in the sunshine
Catching fireflies
Riding bicycles
Learning to swim
Building sandcastles
Making new friends
Simple pleasures of life away from the inner-city

If you do decide to sponsor a child, please consult my Discovery Toys website for some great outdoor toys you can play with.

Windows of Opportunity

Scientific research has shown that there are specific time periods early in a child's life (referred to as the "windows of opportunity") when many important brain connections are set for life. It's the time frame when certain connections take place most effectively in the brain: when we learn to walk, when we learn a second language, when we learn mathematical concepts, and so on. If you fail to learn these things during their critical period, you can still learn them later, but, for example, you won't have the authentic French accent if you learn to speak French at age 20, instead of at age 2, when the window is still open. You can learn to walk if you were in a total body cast at age 1, but you are likely to not have a natural gait.

Everything young babies and children are learning and are exposed to helps generate connections in the wiring of their brains. The more connections there are, the more successful children can be at developing new skills over time.

This impacts social skills as well as cognitive and motor skills, as described in Denise Quinlan's blog entry Positive Relationships - Pillar or Foundation of the House of Well-being? She asserts that "Children who are secure in their primary relationships are more likely to explore and so learn more about their surroundings, thereby building greater knowledge and resources."

One commenter to her blog, Udayan, remarks, "There have been documented cases of children who have somehow survived alone without parents or any other people, and have been discovered at some point in middle childhood. Their development in all areas, such as language, cognition, emotions, social skills, etc., are naturally grossly underdeveloped, and what is worse, having missed critical periods in brain development in which they should have been developing in interaction with others, they were never able to develop their human capacities to a level that approaches those who have been raised from infancy in human communities."

The Discovery Toys tag line teach.play.inspire. reminds us to "feed" our children healthy toys (as opposed to "junk food toys") that make every moment a playful brain-wiring opportunity. That's why so many moms who grew up on these toys themselves are now introducing them to the next generation.

World-class education

Did you watch the President's first State of the Union address Wednesday night? In it, he spoke about education, the lagging emphasis on math and science in our schools and America's risk of falling behind if we don't make education an affordable priority. My favorite line was, "The best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education." Who could disagree?

Back in July 2009, I provided the alarming statistics of where America's teens were ranked internationally in math and science. What are the other countries doing differently? Finland was ranked #1 in both math and science in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Are more moms in Finland staying home and playing with their babies? (The next results, PISA 2009 National Report, won't be released until December 2010. )

Why not help your child get a head start by playing and reading every chance you get? Using Discovery Toys takes the guess-work out of choosing the right toys. Our experts rate the toys by the developmental abilities of particular age-ranges and by the skills developed. Today's pre-schoolers and school age children are tomorrow's scholars. Start now!

Love is spelled T.I.M.E.

In the introduction of the book To A Child Love is Spelled T-I-M-E, co-author Lance Wubbles, a best selling author of inspirational books, writes about a man who in his old age is comparing his newly re-discovered old diary side by side with his son's diary of the same year.

"As he opened his journal, the old man’s eyes fell upon an inscription that stood out because it was so brief in comparison to other days. In his own neat handwriting were these words:

Wasted the whole day fishing with Jimmy. Didn’t catch a thing.

With a deep sigh and a shaking hand, he took Jimmy’s journal and found the boy’s entry for the same day, June 4. Large scrawling letters, pressed deeply into the paper, read:

Went fishing with my dad. Best day of my life."

Remember the tag line of Discovery Toys: teach. play. inspire. I hope our toys will allow parents to spend the type of quality time with their children that will allow them both to remember those moments as some of their fondest. Have you played with your child today?