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Quelling the Quarantine blues. (posting this a couple of years later. Why not? Hope you enjoy it nonetheless).

It’s been months now with little respite insight. The new normal is delving into one’s self and creating activities to delight, amuse and educate our children and ourselves.

Here, we have been doing more and more cooking, completing home improvement projects, daily exercise activities, reading, creating new games, sleeping, and Netflix.

With young children, these are all great starts, but were we find our kids are more and more amused and intrigued are when we meld, mix and cross pollinate activities and toys. For example, on our hell flight back to Hong Kong from San Francisco, our kids discovered Angry Birds. Now how to take this to the next level, we of course had to design and build a giant slingshot out of crib sides and exercise rubber bands and we stacked up various toys and blocks for our demolition structures. A turn at launching balls, toys, and various other objects is a great way to keep the kids amused and outside. No one got hurt and our kids now understand a bit more about physics and design.

That took up a couple of days. Next we discovered that we can fly kites off of our rooftop. This was great until they crashed on the neighbors rooftops.

Running out of creative ideas to blend activities while unable to leave our house, we turned to cooking. Pasta shapes were on the menu. If you want an activity to amuse and feed the kids, there is no better joy than knowing how to make pasta sheets, shapes and meals.

While we still haven’t managed to get back to normal, we have found many ways to learn and enjoy each others’ company. Not to mention all the great meals and memories we created.

Whatever your living situation, find activities which you enjoy doing and share them with your family.

Hang in there world. It will get better.

How STEM toys and Unit Bricks are beneficial for kids. Kids need adventure. It is fundamental to their development to remain active. Not saying that they should be doing hang gliding or bungee jumping, but they need to have access to toys and new experiences that will help challenge them both cognitively and physically.

Our Mini Unit Beams Builder Sets hit the spot when it comes to inspiring creativity, encouraging STEM learning and engaging kids in engineering thinking and design. How can we be so sure? Earlier this month, the Mini Unit Beams Crane Builder Set and the Mini Unit Beam Bridge Builder Set received seals of approval from none other than Purdue University’s engineering research institute, INSPIRE!

Every year, the Center for Early Childhood Education, Eastern Connecticut State University conducts a survey in which researchers observe children playing with a variety of toys -nominated by teachers, parents, researchers, and children themselves - in a free play setting in preschool classrooms. They code children’s use of the toys in three areas: thinking/learning/problem solving, social interaction, and creativity.

Today, with the prevalence of technology, even adults struggle with basic addition and subtraction and must pull out their smartphones to successfully drum up an answer, unless of course they have a portable abacus on hand. That being said, the aforementioned arithmetically-challenged adults have already put in the time and could theoretically perform a simple computation exercise with a little extra thought. In younger years, their brains developed the necessary counting and mathematical skills which allowed them do well on the SATs, go onto fulfilling careers, and navigate their lives.

“Why is the sky blue?” Sound familiar? It’s a common question asked by kids as they grow up and start to inquire about the world. And it’s an unanswerable question without the aid of science. We as parents or teachers may not necessarily have all of the right answers, but how we respond fosters kids’ continual wonderment.

Get ready and set to play: You did your homework and now are in possession of a set of blocks, not just any blocks, but Unit Bricks— specially designed to aid kids’ learning and development. Give yourself a pat on the back and check the most important step off your list. But what to do with that stack of objects sitting on the floor? We’ll walk you through how to get properly set up so kids can put their block set to the best use and be on their way to building structures of their dreams!