Toys and Games

Stuck Inside?  Cooler weather means more time inside, but it doesn’t have to mean endless hours of screen time and sibling squabbles. Check out eight of our favorite activities for indoor family fun and turn your next winter day indoors into memories your family won’t soon forget!1. Classic Card Games – From Go Fish and Old Maid to Concentration or even Spoons, card games are a great way to spend time together, as a family. And all you need is a deck of cards (and some spoons)![caption id="attachment_5097" align="alignnone" width="600"] Photo Credit: signupgenius.com[/caption] 2. Sardines – You may have forgotten but you’ll soon remember what fun it is to hide and seek! One person hides while the rest cover their eyes and count to 30, then let the hunt begin! Find the hidden one and join them until everyone’s hiding – together! Then choose a new hider and start all over again.3. Sculptapalooza – Add a bit of creativity to your together time with Sculptalooza™  the fast-paced, laugh-out-loud family game! Work together to guess what your teammate has sculpted out of squishy, squashy, Playfoam® before time runs out. No one likes reading directions, so watch this super fun tutorial on how to play![embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhS_Ah5NqFo&t=37s[/embed]4. Storytelling Circle – Sit in a circle. Someone starts a story with a single word, the next person adds another, and so on, until a silly story begins to take shape. Guaranteed to get you giggling, this game encourages creativity and teaches flexibility and thinking on your toes!5. Make a Fort and Read – Gather your pillows, blankets, and chairs (tip – chip clips are a great way to keep things in place) and design your own family fort! Then climb on in with your favorite book and a flashlight.[caption id="attachment_5094" align="alignnone" width="620"] Photo Credit: familyeducation.com[/caption]6. Board Games – Board games bring families together and, with Educational Insights’ squeezer games, even preschoolers can get in on the game! Adorable fun for everyone, little ones can practice colors with Sneaky Snacky Squirrel Game®, learn their letters with Frida's Fruit Fiesta™, and master numbers and counting with Shelby's Snack Shack Game®.[caption id="attachment_5096" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Shelby's Snack Shack Game[/caption]7. Treasure Hunt – Take turns hiding something in your house and racing each other to find it. Give one word hints to guide your family closer and closer until you have a winner, who gets to hide the object next![caption id="attachment_5095" align="alignnone" width="300"] Photo Credit: realsimple.com[/caption]8. Charades – Get ready to giggle with a simple game of charades! Everyone writes an act-it-out challenge down on a slip of paper, folds it, and drops it in a bowl. Then, take turns drawing a clue from the bowl, set a timer, and act it out!So let it rain, or snow, or gusty winds blow – you’ll be too busy having fun inside to notice! You can find even more indoor family fun ideas on our Pinterest page.

6 Mesmerizing Sensory Bin Activities for Kids of All Ages

There are so many ways to play with Playfoam Pluffle, but one of the most rewarding ways to get the most out of the mesmerizing, feel-good fluffy stuff is to dig your hands right into a sensory bin! Sensory bins are great, multi-sensory experiences that develop fine motor skills, bilateral coordination (using two hands together), and hand-eye coordination in younger kids and can also be used as a fun way to practice everything from letters and numbers to math and more with older kids. And, of course, they’re a wonderful activity for calming and soothing kids of all ages, particularly for kids experiencing anxiety. Below are a few of our favorite ways to use Playfoam Pluffle as part of a tactically-satisfying sensory bin:

1. Playfoam Pluffle Patterns – Fill two mixing bowls with two different colors of Playfoam Pluffle. Using a spoon and a muffin tin, show your little one how to spoon the first color of Playfoam Pluffle out of one bowl and into the first muffin hole, then swap to the other bowl and hole, repeating to form an A/B color pattern.

2. Playfoam Pluffle Fishing – Hide small objects, such as the acorns from The Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game!®, the bones from Shelby's Snack Shack Game® or colorful buttons in a bin full of Playfoam Pluffle, then use the squeezers, a pair of child-safe tweezers or a scoop to pull them out. The Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set™, is a fantastic set for little hands. Practice sorting the objects by color or size to squeeze in some early math skills.[caption id="attachment_5072" align="alignnone" width="680"] Photo Credit: @my_three_little_strawberries[/caption]

3. Playfoam Pluffle-bet – Hide plastic or magnetic letters or numbers in a large plastic bin full of Playfoam Pluffle. Little ones can use their hands or a magnet to dig out a letter and show it to you – you can say its name and the sound it makes. Help older kiddos find the letters in their names, think of words that start with that letter, or set the letters out on the floor in alphabetical order as they find them.

4. Playfoam Pluffle Tubes – Remove about ¼ of the Playfoam Pluffle from its tube, then add plastic toys like insects or fish, buttons, bells, etc. We added carrots from Hoppy Floppy’s Happy Hunt™ Game. Shake the tube to mix them in, then have your little one roll and twist the tube to find as many hidden objects as they can. Talk about what they’ve found using descriptive vocabulary and try counting them as the objects are discovered. Great for on-the-go fun!

5. Playfoam Pluffle Funds – Bury some cash (use plastic coins and paper money if you’d prefer, like the those from our Play Money Coins and Bills set) in a bin of Playfoam Pluffle. Then, let your kids use their fingers, child-safe tweezers or our preschool game squeezers to make it a little trickier, to extract the money. Younger kids can count the number of coins they have; older kids can add up their value. Play against a sibling or friend to see who has more and who has less.

6. Playfoam Pluffle Excavation – Hide different types of rocks, minerals, and fossils, like those found in our Complete Rock and Mineral Set, in a bin of Playfoam Pluffle. Use plastic tongs or tweezers to excavate each item from the Pluffle and a paintbrush or basting brush to clean them off. Can your kids identify the specimen?  As a bonus, they may want to inspect their findings under a microscope.

 

The Story of Blurt!® Word GameBy Tim Walsh, Inventor

On a beautiful spring day in 1993, I found myself in a 3rd-grade classroom at Gocio Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, surrounded by a horde of 8-year olds who WOULD…NOT…LISTEN. You see, my girlfriend at the time was a teacher and she asked me to come in and read to some students, while she took some other kids out of the classroom for year-end testing. I was failing miserably at that prescribed task. Did I mention it was a beautiful day at the end of a long school year? These kids were done. No matter what book I pulled off the shelf, my attempts to read from it elicited groans of displeasure.Then something amazing happened. In desperation, I pulled a children's dictionary off the shelf. To this day, I don't know why. I turned to the first page and said, "Who can tell me what the word is for… The nut of an oak tree?" Without hesitation, one precocious kid yelled out, "Oaknut!" I said, "No, it's an acorn, but that's funny." I scanned the next few pages for another word and read its definition. "OK, what's the word for… a book of maps?" Another kid, who I didn't think was even paying attention, said, "Atlas!" before anyone else. The kid who had yelled out "Oaknut" a moment earlier, was miffed he'd been bested. And just like that, the power of play revealed itself to me. ALL the kids scooted closer and waited, quite literally, with bated breath. I had their rapt attention. What sorcery was this? Only seconds earlier, they wanted nothing to do with anything I was saying and now? Well now, the race was on.I turned a few more pages and found myself in the B section of the dictionary. I read, "The first meal of the day." That precocious kid blurted out, "WAFFLES!" I said, "No, the word I was looking for was – another kid blurted out, "Breakfast!" I smiled, partly because all the kids were smiling, and partly because the enthusiastic answer of "waffles!" was just hilarious.Right then and there, the seeds of a great game were sown – a game with definitions printed on cards, with a board as a score-keeping mechanism. All you had to do was listen carefully and be first to answer correctly to move ahead.I called it DeFUNitions and made a prototype for the game. Looking back at that hand-made box, I can honestly say, it looked pretty bad. "Pick a color, would ya?!" The cards were all hand typed and the board – glued together with colored paper. Yet, the game, as rough as it was, played well. All the friends I recruited with promises of free drinks and snacks, not only enjoyed it but asked to play a second and third time. All ages seemed to like it, not just the kids who inspired it. However, it wasn't all good news.I found that certain players who were more facile verbally could easily run away with the game. So I added a play mechanic called the One-on-One, where you can send a player back on the board if you're able to beat them toe-to-toe. Another suggestion made repeatedly by play-testers was a name-change. Indeed my teacher-girlfriend warned me, "I don't think you want to use a misspelled word as the name of a word game, do you?" It was made clear to me that DeFUNitions was out, but then what to call it? At the time, a game called Outburst was popular. That name always struck me as negative. Outbursts were not pleasant, but when someone "blurts" something out? That was often funny. But surely the name Blurt had to already be trademarked by some game company, right? It was so simple, punchy and fun. The name was so good, I was certain that the United States Patent & Trademark Office had erred when they granted me the trademark. Incredulously, Blurt! (with the exclamation mark to boot!) was mine.Not so fastI pitched the revised prototype to Hasbro, Mattel, Western Publishing and several other toy companies, and all of them passed on the game. Finally, in 1994, a company called Patch Products agreed to give the game a try and Blurt was published. It started slow, but soon word of mouth began to build the game's audience. It was no surprise that teachers loved the game for its ability to engage kids and improve vocabulary, but early in Blurt's trajectory, it was clear that adults were playing it too... as a party game. The things that people blurted out in an effort to be first were often quite funny. Eventually Toys ‘R Us, then Target, then Wal-Mart and K-Mart, all bought Blurt! National TV and radio shows played the game. We released a travel version, a Bible version, and a card game. Before we knew it, we had eclipsed 1,000,000 copies sold!The heart and soul of the game's success were teachers and in 1997 we were able to donate $50,000 to Literacy Volunteers of America to help in their effort to help people all over the U.S. learn to read.As the game's trajectory continued upward, it was only a matter of time before a larger game company came calling. In 1999, Mattel purchased the licensing rights to the game from Patch Products and I. It was a three-way negotiation that took some time to complete, but we got there. I was poised for a new era to begin – an era that saw the Blurt game sold alongside Barbie.It never happened. The Blurt/Mattel era is a toy tale for another time, but suffice it to say that when the rights reverted to me, the game had been completely off the market for nearly 4 years.Educational InsightsWith all momentum gone, there was a very short list of game companies I trusted to bring Blurt back. I had decided to take the game to its roots, and so I needed a company that spoke the language of parents and teachers. Enter Educational Insights. The General Manager of E.I., Lisa Guili, and her team "got" the game from the get-go. After months of reworking the game for a new audience, we relaunched Blurt at the International Toy Fair in New York.Toy Fair was only the start. Educational Insights continued the effort throughout the entire year, sending me on a Blurt tour along the west coast of the US. I met with enthusiastic toy and game store owners who had missed the game and were thrilled to have it back. It was one of the highlights of my career in the toy industry, getting to meet so many Blurt fans. One of my favorite events was a fair where we created a Blurt game show and pitted friends and family against one another for a chance to win a free game. It was so fun!As the game continued to sell, I was happy to get stores like Teacher Heaven in Texas to promote the fun. Over the years, many radio stations played Blurt with their listeners and gave games away. Here's a clip of a great day in Lubbock, Texas from 2010. It started at KLLL radio and ended up at the Grand Opening of Teacher Heaven where we played Blurt with everyone in the store.Last year I experienced a rare moment of reflection and gratitude at the fun that Blurt has brought to so many people over the years. Here in Sarasota Florida, where I live and where Blurt was born, I had the opportunity of a lifetime, thanks to the marketing team at Educational Insights. Earlier in the year, I received an excited call from E.I. General Manager, Lisa Guili, who informed me (after swearing me to secrecy) that Blurt was scheduled to become a kids' meal prize at Chick-fil-A stores nationally! What a gift to have something I designed promoted to families across the country! So in February of last year, exactly 11 miles from Gocio Elementary, where Blurt was conceived 24 years prior, I had the out-of-body experience of driving through our Sarasota Chick-fil-a and buying a kids' meal for myself. Of course, I recorded it!So it's 2019 and the humble little game that came out of a classroom celebrates 25 years of word racing and vocabulary building. What a privilege to still get contacted by fans of the game who thank me for creating something they love to play. I once got a letter from an architect who wanted to tell me that Blurt was his favorite game "growing up." That made me feel thankful… and old! When a game is on the market for a few decades, a second generation of fans can discover it. How cool is that? I am grateful to have discovered the power of play. Blurt!® has now sold over a million and a quarter copies, educating countless kids and entertaining countless big kids.And I owe it all to a group of boisterous third-graders, and that fateful moment when play saved the day.

Whether you’re traveling near or far this spring break, these classic and soon-to-be-classic car travel games for kids are guaranteed for everyone to unplug and join in the family fun. Give them a try and let us know how it goes!The License Plate GameThis should ring a bell… remember riding around, looking for an Alabama license plate, then one from Alaska? The License Plate Game is still a great way to pass the time in the car. Older kids can find every state – in alphabetic order, even – younger kids can find plates with the letters of the alphabet, in order. Read My List!™ GameReady to think fast? What do a curling iron, grill, and a light bulb all have in common? If you said they are “things that are hot,” then you’re well on your way to becoming a listing legend! Great for anywhere, anytime fun, Read My List™, is a think-quick card game of categories and lists perfect for playing in the car. Listen to a list, remember what you heard, and win points for naming things missing from the list, identifying their category, or being the last player standing in a Lightning Round. With two game play levels – easy and hard – everyone can join in the fun.Slug BugIf your road trip is already turning rambunctious you might want to alter the rules of this car trip classic so that kids race to shout out or tap the center console when they spot a VW Bug on the road. Assign 2 points for classic Bugs and 1 for new models and play to 5.Grandma's Trunk™ Alphabet GameAlso available in card game format from EI with additional alphabet and memory games, classic Grandma’s Trunk is another fun one. Start by saying “I packed my Grandma’s trunk and in it I put a…” and add an item that starts with the letter A. The next player says the same thing, repeating your item and adding their own item beginning with the letter B. Continue play until you reach Z and see who can remember the entire contents of the trunk – in order!Travel Blurt!®Think quick! What do you call a large container of water for swimming? Blurt the answer first, and you’re on your way to winning this riotous game of rapid word recall. This handy, portable version of best-selling Blurt! , is perfect whether you're driving or flying and great for keeping kids entertained on the go. EI wishes you safe and happy travels this spring break!At EI, we believe in sharing, and we bet you do, too, so please don’t forget to share this post with your friends!

What happens when Dazzle encounters the plain and mundane? Watch her add flair and festive fun with her PRANCIFY powers. How do you prancify? #prancifyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZRxc2r6UmsSee Dazzle, one of our newest members of the Puppet-on-stick™ line, in all of her glitz and glory, HERE!

Meet the sparkliest heroes you'll ever know - The Rainbow Prancers! These unicorns possess the power to PRANCIFY: making ordinary situations extraordinary with a simple swoosh of their magical hair. How do you prancify? #prancify Meet these beauties for yourself, here!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK8WQ1ZBZjw

Dinosaur toys never go out of style. Most children go through that phase where they absolutely need the newest and coolest toys based on their favorite prehistoric creatures. Plus, dinosaur toys aren’t just awesome, they’re educational! What’s not to love? It’s no surprise that there’s a wide variety of these toys available for kids and the young at heart.We have a roar-some list of dinosaur toy ideas that can be used for either the home or the classroom. Our dinosaur toys are fun and educational, encouraging creative thinking and positive communication. With these amazing, prehistoric-inspired toys, your little ones will spend hours learning, and more importantly, having fun!Dinosaur Puppet-On-A-Stick™, Set of 3Join Crusher, Stomper, and Buster in prehistoric puppet playtime! These adorable dinosaur toys make for great addition in either the home or the classroom. Kids will love making up stories and telling tales using the easy-to-manipulate and colorful puppets. Teachers and parents love that kids are able to stay entertained, practice creative expression, and further develop their communication skills. The puppets also travel well and clean up easy, making playtime convenient and fun! Dino CheckersThe classic game of Checkers is back and with a Tyrannosaurus twist! Battle with your partner in this prehistoric throwdown, as Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus fight for squares of lava. Captured dinosaurs are held captive in the “tar pits,” and the dinos transform into T. Rex’s when kinged. This game provides fun for kids, as well as teaching logical thinking skills, strategy, positive communication, and problem solving. Add this dinosaur toy to your collection! GeoSafari® Dino Digs VelociraptorsWatch kids find their inner scientist as they enjoy the amazing Dino Dig Velociraptor from Geosafari®. This awesome toy allows students to discover, excavate, and assemble two complete velociraptor skeletons that come from faux fossilized rocks. Perfect for dinosaur units, this kit provides hand-on activity and encourages communication between children. The kit comes fully prepared, offering excavation tools, dust brushes, wax adhesives, and activity guides. Watch your little archaeologists work together to find the hidden secrets of the Jurassic Era with this amazing toy! Dino Construction Company™–Wrecker the T-Rex Skid Loader This awesome titan will inspire imagination and keep kids busy for hours. Not only is it a fun combination of dinosaurs and construction equipment, but Wrecker the T-Rex Skid Loader also promotes outdoor play and helps to fine-tune children’s motor skills. It’s designed to last, and it’s perfect for kids of multiple ages. This makes for a great learning toy for younger children in earlier grades, and can be enjoyed at home or on the playground. For more information on our dinosaur toys and brands, visit educationalinsights.com. Our goal is to provide fun and creative toys that provide an enriching learning experience. With amazing dinosaurs toys and more, we offer everything a parent or teacher needs to build a fun and educational environment.