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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!

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!

Team Mobi here!

Mobi was our very first product and the point of no return for us.  We got such positive feedback from our customers that we knew we had to keep creating.  We also get so many great ideas from the teachers, parents, and kids who play Mobi that we are surprised at all the little ways people adapt Mobi to suit their needs.   In this blog post, we'll share a couple different ways that you can incorporate Mobi into your third grade math curriculum!

1) To begin with, work on identifying number patterns:

Using your Mobi number tiles, show the next 3 numbers in each pattern:

1, 2, 3, __, __, __

2, 4, 6, __, __, __

Using your Mobi number tiles, make a pattern that decreases by 3 each time:

12, 9, __, __

11, 8, __, __

2) Work on basic multiplication and use the tiles to assist you and your child when going through the multiplication tables.

3) Inverse relationships: 

Fill in the blanks using your Mobi tiles:

4 + 5 = __

5 + 5 = __

9 - 5 = __

9 - 4 = __

4) Missing equations: 

Determine the missing number tile in the following equations: 

4 x __ = 12

8 x 2 = 2 x __

10 - __ = 5 + 2

These are just a few examples of ways you can use the full Mobi set to make math a little more enjoyable for your kids.  If you've found other creative ways in your home or school, we'd love to hear from you! 

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!

Team Mobi here!  What an interesting time these last 5 weeks have been!  We are in Toronto and have felt so many different things that I'm sure most of you can relate to:  confusion, fear, gratitude, frustration, worry, more confusion...

One thing that we actually kinda love about social distancing is that we have so much family time together and we have seen some AMAZING Instagram posts by families having game nights that include some of our Mobi products.