We're delighted to announce the launch of our new app for iPhone, Shape Bugs, aimed at teaching preschool children to draw and recognise simple shapes.

If you trust your children with your iPhone or iPod Touch then let them choose a shape to draw.  They can select their favourite colour and must draw the shape as cleanly as possible - squares, rectangles and diamonds must be drawn with four straight lines, triangles with three straight lines and circles and ovals with one.  Don't take your finger off until the shape is complete!

If the shape is reconisable as the one you set out to draw, then you'll hear a cheer and a face will appear to make your Bug.  If the lines weren't drawn cleanly then you'll hear a comiserating 'Ohhh!' and can try again!

Download Shape Bugs from the Apple store, and have hours of fun...!

Building blocks are a timeless toy and a set of soft blocks made from material, or even knitted from wool, will bring your baby loads of enjoyment in their first few years.  An early game to play with babies is to stack up toys near them and encourage your baby to knock them down.  Clap and cheer when your baby achieves this and they will quickly associate their actions with your praise and this will encourage them to knock down your towers.

Blocks usually come in bright colours and often have pictures, letters or numbers on their faces.  This early exposure to colours and patterns will help them to distinguish between colours and to recognise the different shapes later on.  When they are able to grasp blocks for themselves, your little one will delight in trying to build their own towers and knocking them down themselves.  All of this helps to refine their motor skills and to understand how objects interact with one another and how they act when knocked over.

As your children grow older, plain blocks can be change for construction blocks such as Duplo, Lego or Megablocks.  These appeal both to boys and girls and will last an entire childhood, teaching children how to construct models and giving them a great understanding of the physical world.

Sports day is a fun feature of summer, but toddlers who aren't old enough to attend school miss out on all this fun - why not hold your own 'Sports Day' for your littlest children and some of their friends?!  Invite two or three other mum's round with their little ones, set up a picnic outside for everyone, and make up a few races for them to compete in.  If it's hot, ensure there are plenty of drinks on hand!

Sports concentrate on improving motor skills and coordination, so think of some fun events that help do this.  If your little ones are two young to walk or run, then many races could be held at a crawl instead.  If you have a mix of ages and capabilities then introduce handicaps for the more capable children to give the littlest ones a fair chance of winning something.  If you're tight for space then rather running races in parallel you can time each child one after the other.  Here are some ideas:-

Flat race: have your little ones run from one end of the garden to the other, or in a loop around the garden.

Egg and spoon race: good old fashioned fun! Have your babies walk or run from one end of the garden to the other balancing a hard boiled egg on a spoon all the way.  Afterwards you can add the eggs to your picnic!

Sack race: give each child a sack and have them jump from one end of the garden to the other.  Shopping bags would make a suitable 'sack' but make your little athletes understand never to put bags over their heads.

Obstacle course: make up an obstacle course with your little ones having to run around, over and under objects placed around your garden.

Bat'n'ball race: have your little one hit a ball around a course in your garden - use a tennis racquet, cricket bat or any other makeshift bat.

Balancing act: if you don't have bean bags, find other items such as teddies, dolls or toy cars that your little ones can place on their heads and balance round a course.

Make up some certificates and award them at the end of each race.  You'll have great fun holding your own sports day; you'll enjoy watching your children perform, and they'll have so much fun trying out the different races!

Soon after their first year, you'll start to see your little toddlers begin to mimic you and other people they see around them - this is all part of how they begin to understand the world around them.  A really fun game to play at this stage is to sit opposite your toddler and have them copy your moves.  Make simple moves like opening and closing your hands, stretching your arms, nodding your head and wobbling your body.  You'll find the reactions entertaining as sometimes you'll find a move that your little one struggles to interpret and will mimic in a funny way!

After a while, swap roles and copy what your toddler does.  They'll be fascinated by the idea that they can 'control' what you are doing!

If you have a video camera or a digital camera that takes video that you can play back through your television or a computer, take some video of your toddler doing their moves.  Again, they will be fascinated being able to watch themselves back on the TV or computer.

Once your child becomes a toddler a whole new world of toys are suddenly available to them.  They can shake and hold, throw and grasp, walk and run... it's a very exciting (and challenging!) time for parents and carers.  But, how should a toddler's home or setting be equipped?

Toddlers basically play with whatever is available to them. They need stimulus and an actual 'thing' to play with but at this age it doesn't really matter if it's from an expensive toy shop or your kitchen drawers!  They don't know if something has been passed down from an older cousin or if it's brand new.

It is, of course, difficult to put down exactly which toys your toddler needs, because it depends largely on what they like to do and what they already have, but as a rough guide, the types of toys for toddlers should probably fall into the following areas in order to give them a wide ranging and exciting choice.

The Natural World

In order to teach your toddler about nature and the world they need to learn about the natural materials available to us.  Whether you live in a house with a garden or a flat without any outside space, there are so many ways to introduce the natural world.

Activities:

1. Go explore the park or woods and find lots of different things made from different materials.  Find sticks, stones, leaves, grass.
2. Go to the green grocer or market and look at all the different vegetables and fruits on offer.  Look at the colours, textures and shapes.  Even try one you've not have before and eat it together.
3. Talk about your food and where all the things come from.

Water Play

Fill a basin or an old baby bath and splash around with plain water, water will bubbles, warm water and cold water. Find spoons and sieves and all sorts of things to play with in the water.

Activities:

1. Add a few drops of food colouring to water and play with coloured water.  Mix the colours to see what happens.
2. Wash a doll or teddy.  Splash around with bubbles and soap and have lots of fun.  Dry them and at the end wrap them in a towel.
3. Get various objects from round the house and see if they sink or float; whether they get wet (like fabric) or go slippery (like plastic).  Fill and empty things and see that large beakers have more water in them than small beakers.

Messy Play

Buy some modelling clay or play dough, or make your own (log into ToucanLearn to find recipes) and just have a squidgey time!  Make mud pies and mountains and get really messy.  (Just make sure you protect your clothes, surfaces and floor!)

Activities:

1. Make shapes and roll the clay into balls.  Squash it; pound it; prod it and see what happens.
2. Add rice or lentils too and knead it into the clay to make it textured.
3. Make pretend clay people,  or food or animals.  Snip straws and stick them in to make antennae for clay insects or arms for people.

Sand Play

Get a sand pit or go to the beach and build castles, make tunnels or simply add water and change dry sand into sopping wet sand.

Activities:

1. Make some sand mounds and stamp them flat.  Count them as you go.
2. Build some roads for toy cars or animals and put them in the sand.  Drive them around.
3. Wrap some stones with silver foil and bury them in the sand.  Then try and find the buried treasure!

Building blocks

Try and include some building blocks in your toddler's toy box.  They are great for building a make believe train, or a castle.

Activities:

1. Count them; sort them, build with them.
2. Make a long line with them, match them and roll them.

Here we've offered just a few basic ideas.  Toddlers with even some of the above stimulating equipment will have lots of brilliant experiences.  Have fun!

Children love to mimic what they see mummy and daddy doing, and when it comes to gadgets, they'll absorb the most current devices as if they've been around forever.  No doubt you've collected your fair share of old telephones, mobile handsets, computer keyboards, remote controls for broken equipment, maybe even obsolete laptops?!  All of these make for great 'accessories' for children to play with and will be highly favoured over play items because these are 'real' and ones that you used to use!

Before handing them over to the children, remove any old batteries just so that they can't leak, but then they're good to be used a play things.

It doesn't matter if an old computer keyboard isn't connected to anything, or that an old mobile phone doesn't have batteries in it and makes no noise.  The fact that these are real devices makes them highly attractive to your young children, and being able to play with these items will encourage imaginative play between your little ones.

They can use a computer to do 'work' just like their mummy and daddy do; they can use redundant phone sets to call their friends and family; remote controls will just become gadgets that do something you hadn't even imagined yourself!

Nurturing familiarity with these objects at a young age will make them comfortable with real gadgets when they grow older - they won't be afraid to use phone handsets or computers because they won't be alien to them.  Make sure that your children treat these redundant items as they would a working one - make sure they are gentle with them, never throw them, and put them in sensible places rather than leaving them lying in the middle of the floor.  Having them treat these items with respect now will also instil that they need to treat real working gadgets with similar care later on.

Baby showers, long popular in the USA, are becoming increasingly common in the UK and other European countries - for those new to this tradition, we offer some fun ideas for games and activities.  Before that, a word on protocol!

What is a baby shower?!  Contrary to common belief, a baby shower does not take its name from showering the expectant mother with gifts.  The name arises from Franz Schauer, a German immigrant and silversmith in New York who encouraged gift-giving amongst mothers-to-be.  You should bring a gift along for the lucky expecting mother, but much of the rest of the evening harks back to 'hen night', with frivolous games and much fun!  You may also be lucky enough to leave with a bag of 'favours', a goody bag to remind you of the event.

Here are some fun ideas for games that you could play at the next baby shower you're invited to:-

• Blind Tasting: Guests are blindfolded and made to sample a teaspoon of various baby foods - can they guess the flavours?
• Whos Who? Invite guests to bring along a photo of themselves as a baby - everyone must then work out who is who in the pictures.
• Dirty Nappies: Smear smelly sauces and foods into different nappies.  You could put one 'smell' in each, or mix three different ones for a greater challenge!  Blindfold the guests and have them guess the flavours.  Try ketchup, HP sauce, coffee, peanut butter, mashed banana, mint sauce, chocolate sauce, sweet and sour sauce, and anything else that comes to hand!  Catch out the mum to be with some really nasty odours - stilton cheese, garlic, chillies, tuna, Marmite and anything festering in your cupboards!
• Mummy Tummy: Pass a toilet roll around the guests, each one tears off a length as to how wide the expectant mother's girth is.  The winner is the one tearing off the best fit!
• Nappy Brain: Bring out a tray of up to 20 items relating to babies (dummy, nappy, cream, socks, toy, rattle, bottle and so on).  Everyone looks at the tray for one minute, then it's taken away, three items removed, and the guests must say what items have gone.
• Cotton Balls: Get two mixing bowls, a wooden spoon, cotton wool balls and a blindfold. Blindfolded guests have one minute to transfer the cotton wool balls from one bowl to the other with the wooden spoon.  Sounds easy?  Go try it out!
• Pillow Talk: As the mother-to-be opens gifts, one of the guests must secretly note down all the remarks made as she opens each gift.  At the end, the observer reads out the list of remarks, telling all the other guests that these notes were made from outside the expectant mother's bedroom on the night the baby was conceived!
• Famous Babes: Prepare two sets of cards, one with celebrity's names and the other with the names of their babies.  Guests have to match the celebrity with their baby!
• Down in One: Well, down in lots is more likely!  Fill a series of baby bottles with equal quantities of drink - milk or water for purists and expecting mum, wine or beer for the more adventurous!  Have guests quaff the drink as quickly as they can...leaving the teats intact!

Have fun, this could be the last fun evening the expectant mother has for a while!

If you have snow around you then no doubt it's cold, but on the plus side, the children are probably loving it!  Wrap the children up in coats, hats, scarves and gloves, put on some cosy boots, and they can go out and play while the snow lasts.  Here are some game ideas to play outside in the snow:-

1. Snow Sculpture: Traditionally we build snowmen, but why not build snow animals and other sculptures like snow-castles or a boat?  Help your children to scoop up mounds of snow and sculpt it into a variety of shapes!
2. Animal Tracking: Look out for the footprints of different animals in the snow; birds, cats, dogs, foxes, squirrels, rabbits, deer...even if you live in an urban area you'll be surprised at how many animals wander in the wild!  Look for animal tracks and tell your toddlers all about the creatures that make them.
3. Footprint Art: There's nothing more inviting than pristine snow!  Have your children create a track of snow pictures by trampling through a pristine blanket of snow.
4. Obstacle Course: Build an obstacle course in the snow - draw a line that your toddler must walk 'tightrope' style, draw boxes that they must jump between and build hurdles that they must jump over.
5. Target Practice: Build a snowman then have your toddler pelt him (or is it a her?!) with snowballs.  Get a hat and have your children throw a hat onto its head!

You may be tired of the snow, but there are still plenty of games the children can have fun with outdoors!

So, Christmas is over - how much packaging have you had to dispose of?  Is it just our imagination, or do children's toys seem to come with kilo's of superfluous packaging?  In Germany shoppers are entitled to unpackage goods at the checkout and leave the mess for retailers to dispose of.  That has encouraged manufacturers of all goods to reduce the amount of packaging they use - supermarkets and retailer's simply won't stock overpackaged goods.  We think that's a great idea!

Amazon.com, in the USA, offer over 350 products in 'frustration-free packaging'.  These are the same regular products available as normal, but in an easy-to-open box that is easily recycled and doesn't recquire an additional package to be mailed out in. They work with manufacturers directly so that these goods are never over-packaged off the production line.  There are none of those annoying clips, wires, screws and other protective gizmo's that make it nigh on impossible to extract your children's new toys from their packaging.  It's better for the consumer, better for the environment, and it has to be cheaper for the manufacturer.  What a great idea!  We think Amazon  should extend this to all their markets!

In this cold weather it's understandable that parents don't want to ge too far from the warmth and comfort of home, but don't think this means you have to stay inactive.  It is important that little ones do keep active because its only when they use their bodies to the limit that they begin to understand what they can do by themselves and how to mange their own bodies.  The more practice they get the better they will be, not to mention safer when they are playing and better co-ordinated in general.

There are lots of physical activities you can do at home as long as you clear a bit of space.  Here are a few ideas - but do supervise as some of the activites are a bit adventurous!!

1. Let's Go To Bed. Clear a double bed of its covers, and have a bit of fun bouncing and rolling around on it.  Try head-over-heels in the middle of the bed.  Get your little one to stand with wide open legs and see if they can look through the middle, going upside down!  Try moving round the bed by bouncing on their bottom; or just try walking without falling over!  Make sure you explain that this is a special treat and shouldn't be done when you're not around... but have some fun!
2. Lets Go For A walk. Go for a walk around the house and follow any lines you have on your carpet.  Or throw a skipping rope or some string on the floor and try to tight-rope walk around the place for a while.  Try following the rope while crawling or being an animal!
3. Ball games. Try rolling a blown up beach ball to each other, or kicking it back and forth.  Try using your head too!  The beach ball is lovely and soft and light, so its a good one for indoor use.  Just make sure all valuables are hidden away!
4. Fetch. Throw a little toy into the room and run to get it.  Try it as a race!  Try the game on stairs if you have some.  Throw the small toy up the stairs and you both try and climb to that step to retrive the toy.  Make sure with very little ones you remember to teach them to trun round on the stairs safely and come down carefully.
5. Jumping Jacks. Try doing some different jumps together.  Jump over cushions or toys.  Jump in time with music or while singing nursery rhymes.

Have a safe, fun time!

Board games have been around for centuries, they were enjoyed by ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Mayan cultures, and are enjoyed just as much today!  Most of us don't play games so often, until we have families and our children grow into an age that they enjoy games.

Games for the youngest children focus on improving hand-eye co-ordination, recognising and matching objects (shapes, animals, colours etc.) and on fine motor skills.  Games for 2 - 3 year olds are designed to encourage concentration - children are required to begin learning to take turns in sequence, to improve attention span and to follow simple instructions.  Games for older children encourage further skills such as basic maths and reading, social skills, simple strategy and self-confidence.

Games have a recommended minimum age for their audience, for example games may signal that they are suitable for children aged 3, 4, 5 or 6+.  These recommendations are based on various factors such as danger posed by the playing pieces, the level of understanding required and the skills that should have been acquired in order to begin playing the game.  Just because a game states a recommended age, it doesn't mean that you can't adapt the game for younger children, or create an entirely different game based on the same game contents.  For example, you could play Trivial Persuits with all the family, ask real questions to the adults, but make up easy questions for the children.  You don't need to let on that their questions aren't genuine!  You could use a Monopoly board to make up an entirely different game, moving around the board and maybe just collecting property cards for the properties landed on.  There are also lots of games that toddlers can play with decks of traditional playing cards.

Board games can give hours of fun and as your children grow, just adapt the games to suit them accordingly.  Why not get your old games down from the attic, dust them down, and start playing them with your children today?!

Chalks are inexpensive, safe for toddlers to handle and can be used for a variety of toddler craft ideas.  Chalks come in a variety of vibrant colours and the fact that it is composed from solid particles makes it one of the few writing materials that works really well on black paper.  You can create night pictures, stunning firework scenes and many other patterns and pictures on black and other dark coloured papers.

Chalk can be used to make rubbings, just like wax crayons.  Find a textured surface, inside or out, such as a textured lino floor, a piece of wood, tree bark or patio stones.  Lay a sheet of paper over your surface and rub across the texture.  You will create an image of the texture on the paper.  That in itself is fun, but you can go further and have your little ones use that as a background to draw another picture on top.

Chalks can be used safely outdoors to draw on patios or pavements.  Make road layouts, games, obstacle tracks, mazes or other large scale pictures for your little ones to play with.  It might look messy for a few days after, but the pictures will quickly disappear with a bit of rain.

Many games are too complicated for the youngest toddlers to grasp, but there are plenty of games you can play with a regular pack of playing cards that will introduce the whole gaming concepts to toddlers.  A pack of cards consists of 52 cards and 2 jokers - that's probably too many for most games, but pick out a suitable number of cards for your purposes, based on the capabilities of your little ones.

Pairs is a great game for toddlers.  Select your cards, maybe two suits to match numbers, or perhaps two cards from each suit (8 cards in total) to match suits.  You could just match red cards and black cards.  Lay the cards out face down and, in turns, turn two cards over.  If they match, you keep them.  Toddlers may not understant taking turns but they can play alone as a challenge. Pairs will help develop mental ability, colours and numbers.

Practice counting by taking ten cards from Ace to Ten, shuffle them and have your toddler lay the cards out in order.  This will also help tune their motor skills with careful laying out.

Hi-Lo is a great way to teach values.  Lay ten cards out, face down, in a row.  Turn over the first card, and ask your little one to guess whether the next card will be higher or lower in value than the first.  Then turn the card over and see if they were right.  This will help to develop notions of quantity as well as  reasoning and decision making.

Old Maid is more advanced for little ones.  Take two suits of cards and remove one of the two Queens.  Deal the cards out, and have each player discard any pairs.  In turn, offer your cards, face down, to the player on your left.  That player takes one card and if it matches one of their own they discard the pair.  If not, they keep the card.  Play continues until the losing player is left with the odd Queen!

Play with cards, balancing them to stand them up, lay them into patterns on the floor or lay out lines to use as roads for toy cars.  A pack of cards introduces limitless games helps your little ones practice numbers and many other skills.

Toddlers enjoy actively listening to music; who knows, forging a healthy interest may nurture the pop stars of the future!  From an early age toddlers will enjoy banging or rattling along to music.  Give them a wooden spoon and a saucepan, or make a rattle out of a tube!   Tape a double layer of greaseproof paper over one end of a toilet or kitchen roll tube, pour in some dry lentils or pasta, and seal the other end with greaseproof paper too.  Watch and listen to your toddlers make noise along with a song they know - they'll quickly pick up surprisingly good tempo and rhythm!

Singing with Toddlers is also a lot of fun and imparts a wide range of benefit.  Many children's songs teach counting and the ABC song helps to teach the alphabet.  All songs simply help to grow memory and creativity as children absorb and learn them very quickly.  You'll find that they can sing a song and make it sound pretty accurate even before they can speak or understand the words!  As their vocabulary and understanding grows, so the words fall into place.  You too can make up new verses to simple rhymes - make up songs about your child and include their name and you'll quickly have them in uncontrollable laughter!

You'll probably find toddler music groups in your local area.  These are not aimed at teaching musical instruments but an introduction to sound and movement.  Toddler music groups are a lot of fun - if you don't have one locally, why not start one and introduce simple movement and banging and rattling improvised percussion?

Wooden toys are all the rage again as fast growing oriental woods are rapidly replacing increasingly expensive, oil derived plastics, but they come at a premium, so why not look to make your own woooden toys?  Small wooden toys have become inexpensive over the last few years, but large dolls houses, hobby horses, rocking horses and wendy houses understandably demand a high premium.  Surprisingly, if you are at all into DIY, these need not be difficult to build yourself.  Your local hardware store, or out of town hardware depot, will have all the materials you need.

You don't need to learn how to cut old fashioned dovetail joints, how to whittle fancy posts, or how to fashion intricate parts.  Modern materials and design give you lots of fixings, premoulded parts and off the shelf pieces that make large woodworking projects much more manageable than they would have been 20 years ago!  Adhesives and paints have also come on a long way to give you non-toxic and weatherproof finishes.

Soft furnishings, fabrics and the like remain expensive, but as the cost of clothes has tumbled in recent years, it's not completely silly to look at buying new garments to turn into soft furnishings for your constructions or just for the teddy bears!

If you don't fancy designing your project yourself, there are plenty of books that will give you plans and instructions for projects for children's toys, soft furninshings and large constructions.  In a world where we look to buy everything and have it delivered to our door, it's easy to overlook just how much fun can be had in creating your own work, and how rewarding too!