I’m afraid I’ve been spending way too much time over the past couple of evenings (and one afternoon) going through a very cool site for kids…from our own government.

Check out www.Kids.gov. It’s an incredible site full of everything from history to arts to information on how laws are made and much more. The site has aggregated kids-oriented information from a wide range of government sites, but it’s easy to use and quite addicting.

For instance, looking up fitness for kids in grades K-5, I found information on everything from football to Frisbee, with a stop at cheerleading and kayaking. Then I cruised over to find out how I could submit ideas for legislation and checked out what was up for kids in my home state of Delaware. I also took a look at some of the National Parks, a few monuments and checked out a high resolution PDF of The Declaration of Independence.

What’s remarkable about this site is the breadth and complexity of information, but depending on the age level that you choose (Grades K-5 or 6-8 and special information for Educators), everything has been carefully structured and written to be fully understandable, without talking down to kids. And there’s fun stuff to learn: Did you know that nearly 30,000 professional dancers were working during 2008? That’s probably not earth-shattering news, but to kids in junior high considering dancing as a career, this information—and much more—provides a great deal of perspective. I also found that I could volunteer at a National Park or make and break codes just like the FBI or the CIA. There are games that simulate working in the Peace Corps and running an ice cream stand.

For all the time I’ve spent on this in the past week, I’ve also completed crosswords, learned what to do if I lost my passport and had a virtual visit to the Air and Space Museum. But there’s lots more to do. The one thing I’ve found that’s consistent in this is that I can’t find a political agenda in this at all. It’s pure information that’s well researched and clearly presented.

For curious kids, help with school research or just plain interest in a variety of things, this is a great jumping off point for education and entertainment. Check it out.

Play Categories: Around the Web, Internet

If TimetoPlaymag.com looks a little different to you, it’s because we just launched our new redesign. We’ve made our site friendlier, easier to use, and more content than ever before to make your time to play better!

When looking at consumer reviews, sometimes you wonder if they’re real or posted by a friend of the company. that’s why we launched “Real Parents, Real Reviews”. In this feature section you will be able to read reviews from real parents with pictures of the toys being played with by children. You’ll have no doubt these are authentic!

We’re also adding more video demonstrations on TimetoPlay. While it’s always great to read a review, there’s nothing like seeing toys out of the box and how they will really look like. come holiday shopping season, we will have over 700 video demonstrations on TimetoPlay. No more guesswork on what you’re really buying!

Ever want to be on a game show? Are you a fan of Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune or Price is Right? Now TTPLive allows you to be on our original game show and win toys every week. Just click on the link on TTPLIVE and learn how to play. It’s every Wednesday at 1pm! Free to play, but you need to know “your play” to win!

I hope you like our “new look”. We’re playing hard to make your playtime better!

Play Categories: Around the Web, Internet

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time on the Dreamworks Animation online gaming site Kung Fun Panda World. Find it at www.kungfupandaworld.com.

The game was developed by folks who used to work at EA, so the game play is very elegant. The graphics are rich, and the play is highly intuitive with a lot of humor. If you have kids who are into this kind of game, they’ll get it instantly. If not, they can jump in and play without too much learning.

And because I like it so much, I asked Dreamworks Animation to let me introduce people to it. So from now until April 30, you can get a free month from TimetoPlayMag.com and The Toy Guy.

Here’s all you have to do, using the code “time2playkungfu“:

Go to the URL (www.kungfupandaworld.com) and can either:

a)       respond to the screen on the right hand side that says “redeem a promo code now,” or

b)       you can hit “play now” and once you are in the registration flow, there is a place to enter the code.

Here’s the one thing to be aware of: You can only get one free month per computer because the promotion works based on the IP address of your computer.

Try it out. I think you’re going to like it, and that you may want to stick around and play for the longer-term. The regular subscription rate is $5.95 a month, but you can see if it’s right for your kids. If so, it’s a very good value for the level of play you get.

Have fun.

Play Categories: Internet, Video Games

Gimme Back That Filet-O-Fish

If you tuned into our MomTV show today, you probably noticed Jim and Chris having fun with Frankie the Fish. Frankie is the mechanical singing fish from the McDonald’s filet-o-fish sandwich commercial that became an Internet hit last year. The singing fish with the quirky song, “Gimme Back That Filet-O-Fish”, has generated millions of online views, hundreds of user-generated videos, fan parodies and a boat-load (pun intended) of filet-o-fish sandwich sales for McDonalds.

Now everyone can bring Frankie home thanks to Gemmy Industries and their replica of Frankie The Fish. You can find Frankie in retail stores nationwide including Bed Bath & Beyond, KMart, CVS, Rite Aid, and BJ’s for $20. Be warned, however, his song will be stuck in your head for days! Don’t believe us? Watch the commercial below and find out for yourself.

Play Categories: Internet, products

According to CBS’ The Early Show, YouTube.com is giving parents the ability to block questionable content from their kids YouTube viewing. The new control sounds similar to Google’s “Safe Search” feature which has long been available to anyone using Google’s search engine. Unfortunately, it seems as if someone forgot to tell YouTube about this new setting and the Safety Mode link, displayed on The Early Show has yet to appear on the home page.

Confused users are starting to appear on YouTube’s Help Forum wondering where this new safety feature is. Maybe someone at YouTube decided to block it.

screen-grab from help forum

Play Categories: Internet

If you’ve got teens, or even pre-teens in the house, it’s hard not to ignore the reality show “Jersey Shore” now on MTV. Kathy Griffin mentioned it on CNN New Year’s Eve with Anderson Cooper, who claimed to know nothing about the show. Though typically late to the party, the New York Times has become aware of the show’s popularity and its potential impact on the culture.

I became aware of the show when a group of 12-year-old girls were talking about it at an extended family gathering in early December. I was a little taken aback about the language and lifestyle they were discussing, so of course I tuned in.

Yes, these characters are laughable, cartoons of reality. Like so much of the TV of this genre, we know that it is provoked and edited to be as sensational as possible. We’re supposed to loathe these people and look down on them, and the producers have no qualms about showing these young people in the worst possible light—trumpeting ignorance, narcissism and sexuality in about as degrading a way as possible. And it sells, or it wouldn’t be on.

Now I’m no prude, and I believe in freedom of the media. If MTV wants to put that on the air, then by all means they have a right to do so. We can’t stop them, and I wouldn’t want to.

However, it does point out one of the relatively recent challenges of parenting and raising kids in the rapidly evolving media marketplace—playing gatekeeper on a daily or even hourly basis. Because kids have so many different channels to watch, online destinations to surf and access 24/7, it can be a full time job just to monitor what kids are watching. Yet it’s an important one. As parents and caregivers, we can’t control what’s on TV, but we can control the context in which the kids in our lives perceive the material.

Limiting screen time is good. Parental controls on computers are good. Keeping TVs and computers in public areas of the home is good. But at the end of the day, simply banning or preventing potentially objectionable material will only work for so long. Shows and web sites you might ban will inevitably be part of the conversation in your kids’ peer groups. And don’t make the mistake one parent did, thinking that in forbidding her 12-year-old to watch “Gossip Girl,” she was being protected. This young lady knew every plot and designer name. She got if from her friends and saw it at their houses. She simply didn’t tell her mom.

While a steady diet of “Jersey Shore” or most reality shows could make you worry for the future of the human race if it doesn’t bore you to death with its sameness and predictability first, the best idea is not to ban it but discuss it. Watch it with your kids, if they’ll let you, or record it and watch it later. It can be a great teaching tool. It’s not just that you can let your kids know how ridiculous it is for someone to give themselves a nickname like “The Situation” or talk about themselves in the third person; it’s that you can listen to your kids and get their responses to this. In fact, listening, particularly with Tweens and young teens is a good habit to get into. This is one time when teaching can go both ways.

You may discover, as I did with my 12-year-old friends, that they think the kids of “Jersey Shore” are worse than I did. While adults look back and are saying, “How could anyone be like that?” Young people tend to look forward, and say, “I would never want to be like that.” It actually kind of scared them.

Good.

Play Categories: Advice, Around the Web, Internet, Opinions

by Jeff McKinney (follow me on Twitter)

This little tid-bit has nothing to do with video games but it’s fun so I figured that I would share it with everyone. If you have a FaceBook account, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the home page and click on the words “English (US)”. Then when the languages window pops up, select “English (Pirate)” for a swashbuckling new look.

Here is my page after Pirating:

Sphere: Related Content

Play Categories: Internet

By Christopher Byrne (Follow Chris on Twitter)

For a week now, the world has been buzzing about the performance of Susan Boyle on “Britain’s Got Talent.” If you haven’t seen it, and I can hardly believe anyone hasn’t, click here, it’s worth it. She has become an overnight video sensation, a staple on talk shows, the kind of instant star that our culture creates. With her beautiful performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables, she became a global topic of conversation, an inspiration to more than 26 million people on YouTube alone, and a topic of bloggers all over the world.

Me too.

And, of course, given the nature of the blogosphere, everyone has a perspective on it. We need the Susan Boyle’s not just for their talent, but to start culture-wide conversations. The Internet is unifying human experience the way that television did. On one level it speaks to the passing of the technology torch to a new, virtually instantaneous medium that links us all, giving masses of the world’s population the access to something in hours.

The conversation Boyle has inspired is bias and our surprise that someone who is appealing but not movie star gorgeous could touch us so deeply. The media, and the online world, are full of commentary on the shallowness of judging people by their appearance. But why should we? Ms. Boyle entered a singing contest, not a beauty contest. It’s the music that comes out of the package that matters. People in the music business know this. Auditions for most orchestras happen behind a screen so appearance is taken out of the consideration.

But here’s where I think this has relevance to our kids. How often do we hear, “She’s not pretty, but she has a wonderful voice.”  Or, “He’s not very attractive, but he’s an academic prodigy.”

Our hierarchy of values places appearance at the top of the list. To be fair, we see someone before we know anything else about them, and our reptile brains make pre-conscious decisions about what we see. We can’t help that, but we can go beyond that. Susan Boyle shows us that the visual is only one piece of information about a person, and when we make judgments on that level alone, we may miss something—a lot as it turns out.

Every child has heard, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” And yet we do.  It’s a natural human behavior, and we’re not going to change it. What we can do is encourage the children in our lives—and ourselves—to look deeper, to see what each person has to offer. Allowing children to evaluate a person no more deeply than an initial reaction to appearance does them a horrible disservice. It allows them to form opinions on the most superficial levels. When we do encourage kids to take the time to look into others more completely, we go a long way to fostering deeper appreciation of everyone in ours and our kids’ lives, and it makes such childhood disasters as bullying less possible. It’s hard to be mean or dismissive to someone you know and care about. (At the same time, we set the intellectual stage for looking into anything beyond just our superficial, emotional and pre-conscious response.)

In Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim places the artist Georges Seurat in a park in Paris with his mother. They are bemoaning that the world is changing, that it doesn’t look like it did. The mother laments that what is new isn’t “pretty.” Not to her, at least. Seurat replies. He sings:

“Pretty isn’t beautiful, mother.
Pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges
Is what is beautiful.”

And there I think is what we can teach our children. What we now know about Susan Boyle from the myriad interviews we’ve now seen and begun to know—her incredible voice, her devotion to her family, her simple honest expression and her lovely, good humored sense of herself—makes her beautiful. Ironically, all the media exposure doesn’t really let us know her any more than a look at her appearance does. She becomes beautiful, when we see the wonderful things in her and long for them in ourselves. And, honestly, it hasn’t taken much to get there. Just a little bit of looking.

And that’s the thing: We have to look for beauty. Pretty is obvious and unavoidable. Standards of prettiness change with fashion and time.

As Helen Keller said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”

Beauty is both less easy to discern and calls on much more of us—and its perception demands a deeper investment from us. It helps us define who we are as individuals and bring us closer to our hearts and the people in our lives. Given the shared joy worldwide that Susan Boyle has inspired, don’t we want to teach our kids to do that? Don’t we want to that for ourselves?

Play Categories: Experiences, Internet, Opinions

By Christopher Byrne (Follow Chris on Twitter)

I was thrilled to find out this week that LeapFrog has unveiled its first game for the iPod Touch and the iPhone that it will sell through the Apple App Store.

Why?

Well, this is where kids are going, and I’ve been saying for a while that the handheld platform wars are over, and the winners are Nintendo and Apple. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of opportunity because the content wars are just heating up, particularly in the educational category where Leap’s only credible competitor is VTECH.

Everyone who knows me—and listens to me go on and on—knows that I love LeapFrog. They’ve done an incredible job and even with their recent business challenges they have never compromised their reputation with consumers. Ask any parent—and I ask hundreds of them all the time—about LeapFrog, and they know it’s synonymous with quality product. And here’s the kicker: They think that even if they don’t have kids who are LeapFrog age. It’s a textbook case of brand building that has, way more often than not, fulfilled on the brand promise.

According to surveys, more and more iPod Touch units are being sold for kids in the 8-11 year old range, and there are pockets of the country where kids have iPhones. Those that don’t own one but who have parents that do love to play on them.

I have consistently been blown away first by Leapster and then Leapster2 for the younger kids, but the handheld game for older kids, Didj hasn’t caught on quite as much. As kids get older, they want what their peers have, and that has meant Nintendo DS—and now the fantastic DSi—and iPods.  The important issue with these platforms is to remember that having them is what makes kids part of their peer group. The content is going to change from kid to kid—just like the iPod in the population at large. I promise you the songs on my iPod (musicals, classical, some classic rock) would bore you silly and have you make fun of me, but I’m betting that I don’t want to listen to yours. However, we still have the iPod experience in common and that’s where we identify ourselves within the context of the contemporary culture.

Okay, so I ponied up my $2.99 for Number Rumble and had a blast. The game has three modes-learning, quizzing and random quizzing. It enhances memorization of math problems and testing of what’s been learned. Plus, it uses the cool spinning technology that is part of the whole iPod/iPhone interface. It also uses the built-in accelerometer in the random quiz mode.

But here’s where the real genius in this game comes into play. LeapFrog has now taken one of the most arduous challenges of many third and fourth graders—learning times tables basic equations and so forth—and turned it into a game that is not just fun in itself, but uses the hottest platform out there.

Somehow, learning and drilling the times tables isn’t so tough when it’s on the iPhone, even if it really belongs to mom or dad. Plus, you get all the creativity and educational expertise of LeapFrog for only $2.99. When has that happened before?

LeapFrog says that this is the first of a series of casual style games that it’s launching for this platform. I say, hooray. And I’m predicting that as they continue to grow and expand, time on the iPhone or iPod Touch will have to be negotiated within the family, just as in the early days of the home computer when there was only one in the house—and it used two floppy disks. We didn’t think there would be a time when every member of the family would have their own computer, but we’re moving there very quickly.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge that a $50 Leapster 2 or a $169 Nintendo DSI is a far cry from the $200-$300 you’ll spend for an iPhone or the $229 for the basic iPod Touch, but if you have them already, then the LeapFrog programs are a steal.

And then there’s our favorite practice—justification for buying something you already want. “Well, the kids can learn with it…” Face it, you want this thing, and it’s great. It’s not justification to say that LeapFrog just made it better.

Play Categories: Gadgets, Industry News, Internet