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Water and Kids

It is starting to get beautiful out and one thing we are really missing is swimming. With COVID19, all the pools in our community are closed. I think this is the longest my kids have ever gone without swimming. I’ve been a water baby my whole life and am so happy that my kids love to swim as much as I do. During the winter, we swim at least twice a week as a family (I swim 4 times a week) and in the summer …. that all just increases. Not this summer though, so we’ve had to get creative! We’ve been using the sprinker, watering can, hose and water tubs/buckets and we’ve been having a ton of fun (and learning along the way!).

Water play with kids is so important in terms of development. Water play helps develop motor skills, sensory play, problem-solving and social-emotional growth. I will walk through these points below and give some examples from our little family unit.

Motor Development

Water play gives many opportunities to develop fine and gross motor skills across all age ranges. Fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination will be developed through actions such as pouring, scrubbing, stirring, squeezing and squirting!

Sensory Play

Water play is an awesome sensory experience. Kids are introduced to textures such as slippery and slimy and also temperatures!

Problem Solving Skills

If you put a stick in a tub of water, doe it sink or float? How about if you put a rock in? What would happen if you sat in the tub of water? Would the water go up or down? What happens when you get out of the water tub? Tons of problem solving opportunities!!

Social-Emotional Growth

This one is quite relevant in our household right now as we’ve got some water squirters that the kids love to play with. Squirting water at each other is all fun and games …. until it isn’t ;) Both kids are learning to recognize the desires and needs of the other and are working hard to listen to each other. It is a work in progress, but their awareness of both their actions and the other’s reaction to their actions has greatly increased and it has been really neat (but I will be honest - at times trying) to watch and be a part of.

Turn taking is also a big part of social-emotional growth and this is also something we are working on in our household. Talking about sharing and taking turns with the hose, sprinkler and watering can: these are real conversations we are having on a daily basis. All part of growing!

Tell us how you are turning to water this summer! How are you getting creative to keep your kids active, learning and of course cool!?

10 Virtual Field Trips for Your Kids!!!

Wondering what you are going to do with your kids for the rest of the summer?! Look no further than this list! We’ve compiled a great list of companies that have gone over and above the COVID call of duty to make kids’ (and parents’) summer amazing!

Learn about the Amazon Rainforest!

Sail through Antarctica!

Climb the Grand Canyon!

Calling all astronauts! The Space Launch System lets you go behind the scenes here!

Get a live look at Mount St. Helen’s volcano!

Travel to the Etosha National Park in Namibia for an African safari!

Baboons!!! Check out the San Diego Zoo’s live camera feeds!

Baseball anyone? Take a look around Yankee Stadium!

Panda, panda, panda! The Atlanta Zoo has a live camera feed!

Go to the Galapagos Islands!!!!

Bonus: 

The Great Wall of China!

Benefits of Low Tech Toys

Hi everyone! It is the year 2020 and everyone seems to have a cell phone, table and personal computer. As a parent, I can say, these items do come in handy and do play an important role in our household. I for one am able to work from anywhere because of my laptop and phone. This affords me more time with my kids, less transitions throughout the day and so on. If you are a parent, you know being flexible is paramount…and I thank my gadgets for allowing a little more flexibility.

Now…when it comes to kids with technology…I don’t know what is best for others and I am not here to judge what others do as I truly believe parents all want what is best for their little ones ….and sometimes you need to find a Curious George episode so you can cook dinner!

We all know high tech toys. They are available and many have merit …. But today we are going to talk about the benefit of the old-school, low tech toys we grew up with!!! I do believe, and you can see from what we develop at Mobi, that there are so many developmental benefits associated with low tech toys. From the chance of more physical play to the opportunity to learn how to play fairly…there are lots of benefits we can find!

Board Games:

Board games allow the whole family to play together and often involve a competitive element. We’ve started playing Go Fish and Crazy 8s with our six-year-old. This has really been a lesson in playing fair and emotional regulation for him. He constantly wants to change the rules so that he can win, take more turns to increase his chances of winning and often hides behind the couch with a pout (and sometimes tears) when he loses. Game by game, we’ve seen his ability to regulate his emotions increase. The emotions have also provided us a way to talk about feelings, how we handle them, how we control our own thoughts and actions. It’s been really interesting.

Another cool thing about board games is that you can often play them inter-generationally! At Mobi, we’ve got 5 games on the market now and we’ve made a point of this being a key feature of all of them. There is nothing better than seeing our kids play a game with their great grandmother! It’s amazing and something both the littles and great gran cherish. Mobi, Mobi Kids, Ultimo, Bllox and Stello ….. they can all be played with all ages!

Stuffies:

We’ve just gotten into stuffies as a household. It all started because my son was afraid to sleep in his new bunk bed on his own. We talked through it and I gave him my old stuffed bear from when I was a kid … Bert. Bert has become a favourite and sleeps in that bunk every night. Bert can be thought of as a transitional object …. He provides a feeling of consistency and security when our son was adjusting to the new bed.

Bicycles:

We’ve got a six-year-old and a two-year-old who are extremely active. Bikes have been wonderful thing for our family. Our son can ride a two wheeler now and our daughter is on a balance bike. Not only do the bikes provide physical activity and therefore burn off a ton of energy….they provide an opportunity to learn about road safety and help develop balance and motor skills. 

We’ve notice our son grow up a lot since he began riding a two wheeler. There seems to be a huge sense of freedom, independence and empowerment that comes along with riding a bike. Our son has begun to trust himself to make more decisions on his own and we’ve also encouraged him to lead us on family bike rides … to be “the leader”. It has been so neat to watch his confidence grow.

We’d love to hear from you! Tell us some “old school” or low tech toys you love!

Mobi Kids and Sudoku!

Hi everyone! We are mixing two of our favourite games in this post… Mobi Kids and Sudoku! You can go ahead and print off the grids we’ve made!!

One thing that we love doing as a family is playing games. We happened upon a Sudoku for kids book at our Nana and Papa’s house last weekend and our 6 year old took to it immediately. We were honestly kind of surprised as sitting still does not happen too much with this little…but sit he did!

One tricky things that was pointed out was how the little grids were. Our son found it difficult to make his numbers so small. If you follow us on Instagram…you will see that our numbers are VERY BIG right now! To make Sudoku work for us…we simply took the grid and drew it on a bigger piece of paper – perfect! This worked in terms of fitting our numbers into boxes and also gave us some room to write down the possible numbers at the top of the boxes. Win, win, win!!!

 Awesome things about play Sudoku with Mobi tiles….

• You can move tiles around at will and try variations of play very easily.
• There is a tactile approach added to the game.
• The game becomes more colourful
• You can play the same grid over and over because once you take the tiles off, the grid is clean!
• Playing with numbers will get your littles comfortable with numbers. The fact they can try and try again without have to commit to a move proved to be really positive for our family. “What if we tried this?” …. Hmmmm “What if we put this tile here? Would that work?”
• The game becomes cooperative for multiple players. We were able to play as family. With a pencil, that is a little tricky, but with Mobi tiles, Sudoku became a working puzzle.

We’d love to hear about other ways you play with Mobi tiles! The possibilities are endless! We've included some here for you to play with!!

How do you play with Mobi?!?!?!

Hello everyone! There are so many things we love to do with our kids and being outside is one of them. One activity we’ve been doing is going on scavenger hunts! One of our favourite things to find or pick up = rocks!

Why rocks? I have no idea. It started about a month ago and we haven’t looked back. Every ravine walk we go on yields us a ton of prolonged fun. The kids like to pick different rocks. Sometimes we pick big, heavy rock and sometimes, the little (baby) rocks are the choice of the day.

As you know…. at Mobi we LOVE toys and activities that disguise learning and make it fun, right?! Open-ended, developmental play is the name of the game! Rocks are no different. There is no wrong way to play with them. Well, I take that back. Throwing rocks at someone is not a good idea and as you can imagine with two littles, we’ve had to have that conversation. Throwing at your sibling aside (!!), there is no wrong way to play with rocks! One of our favourite things to do with the rocks has been to paint them!

Painting rocks!

This is a great calm down activity after a day out. The kids love it and love having something beautiful to physically show after all their effort of “hunting for rocks!” seems to really excite them!

There are so many benefits that come from painting and I’ll hit on a few below:

The Brain:

Creative activities like painting exercise a different part of the brain than reading or math. The right side of the brain is often called our creative half. It is responsible for visual skills and understanding what we see with our eyes. Painting and creative play help exercise your child’s right brain.

Motor Control:

Squeezing the paint tubes into little containers, holding the fine paint brush and the act of painting ….we are working both fine and gross motor skills here. The bigger the canvas (if conventional and using paper ;) ) the more gross motor work at play.

Sensory Experience:

Painting on any surface is a beautiful sensory experience. With rocks, this is slightly heightened because there are so many edges, curves and textures. 

Cause and Effect:

We are big advocates of cause and effect play at Möbi. It is huge for development and we have tried to incorporate this into all our infant/toddler products. With painting …. kids are also working on this! For example, when a child starts out with yellow paint but mixes blue in ….. they will be able to see that that one action creates blue!

Verbal Language Skills:

As a parent you can ask open-ended questions like “what are you painting?” or “would you tell me about your painting”? As you can imagine, in our household we can some crazy answers! Rocks have become ninjas, dragons and rainbows.  Asking open-ended questions, just like open-ended play, allows your child to stretch and grow his/her thinking and verbal skills. 

Confidence:

Whether your child’s rainbow comes out looking like a rainbow or a brown clump …. They will take pride in their painting and will see in your eyes that you do too.

We would never have thought that collecting rocks would be as fun for our family as it has turned out to be. We’ve been asked if we will hang our kids’ rocks on the fridge with their other artwork! Instead we are forming a rock garden!!

What are you guys doing to keep creative? We’d love to hear from you!

 House of Webs

Hello everyone! We hope this finds you well and enjoying the abundant family time that this pandemic has provided us with. We are slowing things right down on the weekends and letting our kids lead the days. This weekend, they found some string…..and oh what fun they had.

As you know…. at Mobi we LOVE toys and activities that disguise learning and make it fun, right?! Open-ended, developmental play is where it’s at! This string was no different. They literally “webbed” the entire house. The adults thought it was very “Mission Impossible-y” and pretened the string was like a lazer beam that would zap us if we touched it. The kids…..played that way with it for a while, then pretened that the string was their bridge and that if they didn’t walk on it, the pretend alligators would get them. They had a ball! Speaking of balls….they also dumped out our ball basket and tried to through the balls under, through and over different parts of the web!

Questions for the kids:

Lose or Tight:

At various places around the house, the string was either loose or tight…or somewhere in the middle. We went around and asked them to talk about the tension of the string at different points.

Long or Short:

Same idea as above. Where did you make the string reach for long distances? Where do you see a short piece of string? 

Under or Over:

Do you think you can step over the string without touching it with your body? Can you crawl under the string without it touching your body? We did this all around the house, and the kids loved it! Think high jump and army crawls! Very cute and quite an active activity!

Developmental Benefits of Web Building!

Fine Motor Skills: Rolling the string out and placing it around certain household objects like sink faucets, door knobs, railings….required quite a bit of fine motor skills!

Cause and Effect: We encouraged the littles to watch what happened when they stepped on the string. Did it tighten in other places? Did it get loose? What did it feel like under their feet?

Coordination and Proprioception: Over or Under as described above was big for coordination and proprioception. The kids had to make sure they knew where their bodies were and had to focus on where to put limbs as they moved over or under!

Concentration and Focus: Although it seems all fun and games…there is quite a bit of concentration and focus required to move through a web and even set it up! We were super very impressed with their desire to web the entire house and then play for hours.

We never thought we’d make a web in our house, but we also never thought we’d be quarantined for this long! When we took the web down on Monday, we made sure to wind the string back up nicely so we could do this another day! We will certainly do this again independent of quarantine! We also think it would be a really cool backyard activity!

Why we made a “math” game!

Hello everyone!

Hope you are all doing well. Way back in 2012 we had an idea and that idea brought us to this point. It’s crazy what one idea can lead to. The idea was for a number game. This call came about because we were travelling with good friends. Disclaimer: we are complete nerds. We were playing all sorts of games….Boggle, Bananagrams, Scrabble. When we arrived back in Toronto, I was jet-lagged and couldn’t fall asleep. I was thinking about all the fun we had had travelling and playing these games and wondered why none of them involved number play.

Stroke of Insight

I woke up my husband so excited about this game I had made up in my head. As it was 2am….he was not as keen as I was so I tried to keep my excitement until the morning! The next morning, I told Mark all about Mobi. How gameplay would work, what the packaging would be like, how much fun it would be…..He was intrigued but not sure. How could this not exist?

Prototype

I got to work and asked our contractor friend Tomas to cut little wood tiles for me. I then painted these tiles and drew numbers on them. Game on right? Nope – the game was TERRIBLE! It was extremely hard to play. I didn’t have numbers right or the number of tiles right. I also had way too many division/multiplication tiles and way too few plus/minus tiles.

Back to the drawing board I went…..and then…..Mobi started to be fun. We couldn’t stop playing! There must be a game like this we though. So we went to all the toy stores and found nothing. We hounded the internet, and nothing! Crazy. Now we HAD to do this!

Mass Production

Finding a manufacturer was the next step. Googling “boardgame manufacturer” provided us with our first manufacturer. We are happy to say, we are now on our 3^rd and most lovely manufacturer! (to read between the lines – we had A LOT of quality control issues with our first two manufacturers which lead us to have to hire university students to sort through 22 thousand sets of Mobi to separate the “good tiles” from the “bad tiles”.)  We survived to tell the tale though and are so pleased to be on this journey!

Onward we go!

Once we designed and launched Mobi, many parents were writing us saying that they loved Mobi but had little kids and wanted a game for the younger generation. Between idea and launch we had also had our first child, Noah. We knew we wanted a version of the game that we could play with him when ready…and Mobi Kids was born. 

Since inception, we’ve developed 5 games and 3 infant/toddler toys. We love the journey. Watching what our kids gravitate to has provided so much inspiration for what we design. We’ve got a number of new projects in the works and literally can’t believe that we get to make toys and games for a living!

Mobi products are now sold all over the world. We can’t believe what can happen in 5 short years. A huge thank you for coming on this amazing ride with us! Can’t wait to show you what we have in the works!

It's a Balancing Act

Hi everyone! We hope you are keeping well and staying safe. We are on week 9(?) of isolation up in Canada and we are strangely getting used to the “new routine”. The kids are out of school but getting used to the new normal and although we aren’t into pandemics ….. it has been nice to slow down and get to spend more time with the family. Always a silver lining.

We aren’t sure if you know but everyone who works at Mobi used to be a professional athlete of some nature. Weird but true fact. My husband played volleyball, I played basketball and Christine (aka Cho) played basketball as well.

Bringing up little kids in an environment where parents are used to being active has been awesome. Our littles run circles around us in terms of energy and are always up for new adventures. Bring up active little kids when you are quarantined for 4 weeks and counting ….. that’s a whole other story (wink wink)….we’ve just had to get creative!

We’ve talked about open ended play with the toys we produce at Mobi. If you recall, open ended play is important as it gives children the freedom to explore, create, fail and reassess. We’ve brought open ended play into the physical play or activity we do as well. One item that we’ve had in various places around the house is a balance beam. This has been awesome during the last four weeks. We got it from IKEA way back when and it has been a dream purchase.

* Disclaimer: we promise our living room isn't always so "lived" in ;). We've rearranged some things since being quarantined!!!

Our kids are 6 and 2.5 year sold but both are pretty engaged and fearless when it comes to the balance beam.

Here are some things we do on the beam!

• Walk all the way forward on the beam.

• Walk all the way sideways on the beam.

• Cross one foot over the other as you walk sideways on the beam. 

• Catch a ball at every red step on the beam. This includes a parent throwing a ball. We us all different balls. Bigger balls for Kate who is 2.5 and smaller balls for Noah who is 6.

• Make an obstacle course involving the beam. The beam is usually the first obstacle for us. So the kids have to walk across it in various ways, jump off and then run through the kitchen and around “the loop” through the dining room without being caught by the tickle monster (daddy), high five mommy (me!) and get back on the beam.

This is the kids’ favourite beam activity by far. There is something about the calm start, crazy middle and high five at the end that just gets them.

If you don’t have a beam in your house, you can always make a pretend one with tape on the ground, paper or pillows. Although there won’t be height off the ground, these options still give your littles something to focus on and a line to follow!

Quarantined Bunnies

Hi everyone! We hope this finds you and your families keeping safe and well. What an interesting Easter this will be! The weather is getting nice out, the trees are starting to buds and the kids are pining to get outside! Life in April of 2020 is like any we April we have experienced before and hopefully ever will.

In saying this, there are so many things to be thankful for. We want to give a shout out to all the doctors, nurses, RTs, admin staff and custodians who are allowing us to be “safe at home” during these times. We wish you and your families peace and well-being this holiday weekend. Thank you for all you do.

Even though we are living in the age of a pandemic, we at Mobi believe we still have a lot to celebrate and Easter is a wonderful way to start. There are so many memories we have as adults that come up around the holidays and we want to create those long lasting memories for our little ones.

Things we do to celebrate:

Easter Egg Hunt:

Our kids are VERY excited about the upcoming Easter Egg Hunt we do each year. This is something that doesn’t really need to be altered due to the quarantine. Eggs can be hidden inside and in our backyard! Both kids already have a set of bunny ears courtesy of Nana and Papa….so they are basically ready to go!

Family Weekend/Dinner:

Dinner will be a little smaller this year as we usually celebrate with our extended family…but we will make it fun nonetheless. We’ve got a great recipe for carrot muffins that we are going to try (the Easter Bunny’s favourite of course ;)). We will also probably go on a long walk it the ravine, or a scoot around the neighbourhood. A movie night with popcorn will probably jump in there at some point. Although every day is kind of weekend of our kids right now, we want to make this weekend a little more fun and a little less “ordinary” if that makes sense!

Flowers:

Flowers scream “SPRING!” to us. We are up in Canada….so spring can never come soon enough. We always get tulips on Easter. They are super beautiful and easy and add a nice touch of color and life to any house!

Egg Painting:

We’ve never done this with our littles, but remember this from when we were young. Have you tried with your kids? We think ours are just at the right age to be delicate enough with the eggs.

Steps:

• Take a pin and put holes on either side of the egg.

• Blow the contents of the egg out into a bowl.

• Paint/color or dye your egg! You can use paint, markers or dye (see the link below for natural ways to dye your eggs!)

https://www.parentscanada.com/family-life/easy-diy-ways-to-naturally-dye-easter-eggs/