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Team Mobi here!

First of all, Happy Memorial Day to our American counterparts!  Last week, us Canadians had a long weekend for Victoria Day, but the weather this week seems to really be heating up!

This week marks the start of summer activities, but this year is a little different due to the virus-that-will-not-be-named.  It's been a little confusing navigating what's safe to do with the kids as the guidelines have been vague at times, and differ depending on your country, province/state, and even town/city.  We found a good little guide by NPR on the safety of various outdoor activities this summer and thought we'd share a brief summary of your lower risk options.  For the full article, click here.

 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!

Homemade Marble Run

Hello everyone! We are getting creative these days and making toys from things we have around the house. Our son is aware that we make toys for a living and continues to come up with some great ideas. Today he thought of making his own maze. We thought it was a great idea! Now what would we make a maze out of??

• Cardboard/or cardboard box.
• Popsicle Sticks
• Ball/Bell

You will also need scissors and adult supervision for those scissors!

• Okay so first is first. Determine the size and how many sticks you will need. You could also probably use sticks from outside as long as they are somewhat straight or even pipe cleaners!

• Next you have to decide what you want the maze to look like. We suggest drawing this out on paper to practice or in pencil on the cardboard before cutting.

• Get your maze on! Cut along the areas you are going to put the popsicle sticks and insert the popsicle sticks. We made a hole at the end of our maze that the ball had to go through.

Building a maze was a great family activity. We got to talk about where the ball would go, how it would move, where to put sticks. We had a little engineer on our hands. Super cute. Along with all this great family time, there are a lot of development benefits of this maze….and you know that at Mobi we LOVE toys that disguise learning and make it fun, right?! Open-ended, developmental play is where it’s at!

Here's a video of our marble run!

Developmental Benefits of Maze Building!

Fine Motor Skills: Guiding those sticks into the slits cut for them is a great example of fine motor play. As your little moves the ball through the maze, they also have to work on fine motor as little moves can move the ball a lot…so your kids have to work on controlled movement.

Visual Tracking Skills: Following where the ball goes and where you want the ball to go is great for visual tracking.

Cause and Effect: The way your little one moves the maze dictates where the ball goes. Tons of cause and effect in play!

Coordination: Just like above, as described in cause and effect … coordination is big here. Two hands on the maze, moving a little ball through a course is supreme coordination.

Concentration and Focus: Although it seems all fun and games…there is quite a bit of concentration and focus required to move the ball through the maze and into the hole. We were actually surprised at how much we as adults had to concentrate. The speed of the ball plays into this and of course how the maze is designed…but we were very impressed with our 6 year old and how he handled himself by channeling his focus on being able to get through the maze! 

As you can see, building a maze provides hours of fun and also tons of developmental opportunities.

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!

Team Mobi here!  Given the whole COVID-19 situation, I think many of us probably have enough toilet paper for months (years?).  With everyone staying home, you might have also noticed a natural increase in toilet paper usage as well as the subsequent influx of toilet paper and paper towel rolls. 

 As we mentioned in a previous blog, collecting random things that might otherwise be recycled or thrown away is a great way to get kids to use their imagination and create awesome art projects.  Here are some creative ways you can use your extra rolls!

• Dinosaurs! Who doesn’t love dinosaurs?  Check out these super cool designs that we found on Pinterest.
• Build a fun “campfire!” We got this idea from one of our superfan families.  The idea is to use your TP and paper towel rolls as fire “wood” and then let your kids use their imagination to build a campfire scene around it.  Then take a battery powered tea light and put underneath your pile of wood, and there you have it--an indoor campfire.  Feel free to incorporate whatever other elements you'd like--sing songs, "roast" marshmallows, or tell ghost stories!

• Make funny hats!  The picture you'll see below is from the early 1990s.  As you can see, one of our unnamed team members was a pioneer in using toilet paper & paper towel rolls in arts and crafts.  Use whatever odds and ends you have laying around and encourage your kids to really use their imagination and create something amazing!

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.