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18
Jun

GIVEAWAY: Restock Your Game Closet with 8 Parents’ Choice Award Winners

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Games Giveaway

This week, three fans of the Parents’ Choice Foundation and Absolutely Mindy of SiriusXM’s Kids Place Live will win the game prize package shown above.

Enter below by Thursday afternoon for a chance to win eight Parents’ Choice Award winning games, including ThinkFun’s Hello Sunshine! for toddlers and Blue Orange’s silly memory game Ooga Booga!

Entries will be accepted until 5pm EST on Thursday, June 20th. Winners will be announced on Friday, June 21st. Email addresses are collected solely for the purpose of contacting winners. Only United States residents may enter, please. Prizes provided by Parents’ Choice Award winning companies. For more details about the Parents’ Choice Awards program, including information about how winners are evaluated and chosen, please visit our website.

Best of luck to those who enter, and thanks to the companies who have made this giveaway possible! Because of them, each winner will receive the following:

Hello Sunshine

A plush sun with a sweet smiley face that contains a deck of doubled-sided cards. Draw cards and hide Sunshine for a fun game to play with toddlers.

SET Junior

SET Junior, a spin on the familiar version of SET, is a challenging board game for children ages 3 and up in which players must look at cards with different color items, shapes of items and number of items and determine if three cards make up a set.

Shelby’s Snack Shack

Shelby’s Snack Shack is a board game that teaches preschoolers numbers and counting, through the collection of bones each player retrieves after using a spinner spinning and picking that number of bones from the “beach” board.

Dreaming Dragon

The object of Dreaming Dragon is to remove as many plastic lizards as you can without causing any dragon eggs to fall off the dragon. The lizards and dragon eggs sit on top of a large plastic sleeping dragon.

Katatu

Katatu is a modern version of an ancient Roman game that traveled to Egypt and then throughout the rest of Africa, where it is still played today as a way to teach children strategy and fair game play.

Ooga Booga

Ooga Booga is a lively and silly memory game. Players take turns reciting a sequence of nonsense syllables and emphatic actions that grows as each player reveals a new card.

What’s It?

What’s It is a guessing game in which players team up and play against a character called The Doodler, instead of each other. One player rolls a die to select the category, such as “You wear it” or “You use it.” Then a Doodle card is flipped over and all players write down what they guess the doodle might be, according to the category.

Ambiguity

The concept of Ambiguity is simple—roll eight letter die, set the timer, jot down as many words as players can make out of the letters—but mastering the game isn’t easy. The letter dice are designed, as the game’s title suggests, to be confusing. Many of the die faces represent more than one letter, and it’s not immediately obvious what they are.

17
Jun

Time Shift Your TV – The Fosters

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If you and the teens in your house are looking for a modern family drama about an unconventional family, The Fosters, a new ABC Family channel series, might be worth checking out.

“We are definitely not the Brady Bunch,” says main character Stef Foster in the pilot episode, which aired earlier this month and is available on ABCFamily.com. It has been well-received by TV critics. The New York Times cited the cast as being “charming.” The third episode of the series airs Monday at 9 p.m.

It’s not nearly the charming show that Modern Family is. But few shows offer the level of wit and heart found in that ABC sitcom.

Like Modern Family, The Fosters is about a multi-ethnic family, a mix of foster, adopted and biological kids being raised by an interracial lesbian couple.

(The Christian group One Million Moms has been opposed the show since last fall, when it was first announced by executive producer Jennifer Lopez. The group is still protesting ABC Family, asking to get it taken off the air because it is “attempting to redefine marriage.”)

Teri Polo stars as Stef Foster, the biological mom of teen piano prodigy Brandon. She had him with her ex-husband Mike. But then she left Mike for Lena Adams (played by Sherri Saum).  Also in the family are adopted Latino twins Jesus and Mariana. And new to the house is troubled Callie (Maia Mitchell), a teen who is just out of juvenile detention and has more than one secret she’s keeping.

They all go to the Anchor Beach Community Charter School, where Lena is vice principal. And yes, it’s right on the beach! Lucky kids.

But the kids are not happy and they rarely seem to feel lucky. There’s always, well, drama.

The show is not unlike Nickelodeon’s Degrassi. One of the kids seems to be stealing and maybe selling drugs. The twins are facing the fact their biological mother may soon become a part of their lives. And the lesbian moms perform parent-type acts: They cuddle in bed and kiss each other as they navigate their way through their kid and work problems.

Lopez, in an interview with AP, explained recently that the show is trying to “really be a reflection of what’s going on in society…in a smart, edgy, funny, heartfelt way.” She added, “You can’t keep spoon-feeding the idea of what the perfect family is. It just doesn’t exist,” she said. “Even myself, I have two kids, their dad (Marc Anthony) doesn’t live at home with us. I’m divorced. They have four stepbrothers and sisters from two other moms. It’s not traditional.”

In the end, what makes a show good are the characters you care about, the messages that resonate and storytelling that touches.

Can The Fosters foster that for you and the teens in your house?

 

13
Jun

The Parent Trap

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 I’ll admit it. I am/was a nervous mother. I anticipate the fall of a wobbly child and subsequent boo-boo and it makes me wince. Like many, my husband and I did a basic, de-hazarding of the house when the kids were learning to walk, sending  a particularly lethal-looking coffee table to the third floor for at least ten years. I was reluctant to let my daughter toddle alone at the top of playground equipment at the age of two because it was a long way to fall.  I still fight the impulse to catch or worry about other kids at the playground.  So does that mean I raised a wimp?

Psychology Today has published an interesting article titled “A Nation of Wimps” which theorizes that by shielding our kids from ever feeling bad—either physically or emotionally—we’ve set them up for a bigger fall in later years.  I understand and agree with some of the points. Still, it seems like parenting styles are blamed for every generational problem. I advocate for rubberized playgrounds because they are more sustainable, self-sufficient and inclusive. You can’t roll a wheelchair over wood chips. Although I feel bad when my daughter suffers a disappointment or failure, I recognize it is an important part of the growing process.

Kids need to learn to take a metaphorical hit.  It makes me wonder, though: Do parenting styles reflect the times, the culture, or current fads? How much of parenting is instinctual and how much is socially influenced? Does good, common-sense parenting ever go out of style? Are you worried that you have raised a wimp?

10
Jun

Time Shift Your TV – Misters Rogers Remix

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Sing TogetherInstead of watching an entire TV show this week, we strongly urge you to take 3:33 minutes and watch the new and delightful PBS song, Mister Rogers Remixed: “Sing Together.”

PBS Digital studios released a Mister Rogers Remix, “Garden of Your Mind,” and it went viral. It has nearly 9 million views on YouTube. It showed the famous kids show host saying, “Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind?” The idea was to capture 30 years of lessons and turn them into a video to remind us all to be curious “about many things.” According to Mashable.com, the creative team behind the project includes producer John Boswell, who is known for his Symphony of Science project, which remixes science with music.

This past week PBS’ Digital Team released the new remix (Side B) “Sing Together,” and it’s already wildly popular, too. In the catchy tune, Mister Rogers asks:

Did you talk with the people you love last night?

Are you discovering the truth about you? I’m still discovering the truth about me.

When people are honest with each other they’re able to do all sorts of fine things.

Keep an ear out for a delightful bell segment about two-thirds of the way through.

The refrain is the best part. “There’s so much in this world we can learn – no matter how young or how old we are,” raps Mister Roger, adding, “We can sing together.” It’s a joyous and uplifting tune. Dare you to watch it just once!

Watch Mister Rogers Remixed: Sing Together (the B-Side) on PBS. See more from PBS Remixes.

 

06
Jun

Announcing the Spring 2013 Parents’ Choice Book Awards!

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2013 Spring Book Awards

We are excited to share our Spring 2013 Parents’ Choice Book Awards!

Find beautiful books about artists like Diego Rivera, Horace Pippin, and Henri Rousseau. Or, inspire young foodies with Cajun recipes, a kitchen book club, and a lovable biography of Julia Child.

This season, our winners include many titles about all aspects of our universe, from the tiny through the huge. You Are StardustPi in the Skyand I, Galileo are just a few of the books we found that trace our world from the tiniest bacteria through the edges of space.

Be it a middle grade chapter book or a high-spirited guide to bird-watching, the right book at the right time transforms children into lifelong readers. Award winners fall into the following categories:

Doing & Learning | Fiction | Historical Fiction | Non-Fiction | Picture Books | Poetry

Explore them all!