Free WOW TOYS Clippety-Clop Farmer

About WOW Toys

Wow introduces themes from real life into the home, from helicopters to tractors, police cars to diggers, and boats to ambulances. Every toy helps children make sense of the world around them through imaginative play.

Wow toys are highly collectable, as children can mix & match the range to build fun worlds. The toys are designed to work together & all the figures can be used in any toy.

The toys are packed with exciting features to discover & no batteries are required, so the fun never ends!
Wow toys are a favourite not only with preschool children but also with parents & kindergartens too.

Suitable for all ages between 1 & 5 years.

Promotion Details

Free WOW TOYS Clippety-Clop Farmer valued at A$14.90 on your A$50 purchase or more of WOW toys. Offer Ends 31/11/2009 or while stock last.

HOW IT WORKS:

It’s easy… just follow these simple steps!

1. Add A$50 or more of WOW Toys products to cart.
2. Checkout and make payment for your order.
3. After we receive your order, we will add WOW TOYS Clippety-Clop Farmer to your order as a free item.

There are literally hundreds of books on the subject, many of them more than a few hundred pages in length, detailing the best methods to use in potty training, and certainly an entire field of child psychology devoted to the subject, and still, it has not yet been perfected to a science. Every child will learn at a different pace, and every child will respond to different techniques than the next child.

Serious study into the psychology of potty training began, of course, with Sigmund Freud, who put forth that potty training is one of the most important components in the early phases of an individual’s psychological development. The general theory being that a child must be taught that bodily desires do not always take immediate precedence over social and other imperatives. As such, a child who is potty trained poorly may grow up to experience difficulties in controlling their own inhibitions in a social setting, and a child who is potty trained too strictly may grow up to experience issues of self worth centred around cleanliness and perfection.

While many of Sigmund Freud’s theories have been considered less and less important over time by the psychological community at large, they remain the foundation upon which much of modern psychology is based, and Freud’s theories on potty training are no exception.

While different children may respond differently to various methods, the one constant, believed by nearly all child analysts, is that a potty training routine must remain consistent, and must focus on positive reinforcement as opposed to punishment or scolding. In short, a child spends the first year and a half of life using diapers. Rather than punishing a child for doing something they consider normal, it is much more effective to reward them for taking a developmental step forward.

Between the ages of eighteen months and two years of age, most children enter a phase wherein they hope to earn parental approval. Almost invariably, child psychologists recommend making the most of this time by focusing on potty training. Some parents wait too long, and wind up with their children going through a stubborn, rebellious phase, where they are more concerned with asserting their independence than they are with impressing their parents. It’s certainly not impossible to teach a stubborn child to use the potty, but it’s nothing if not an uphill battle.

In general, it’s a good idea to make the act of potty training fun. You need your child’s cooperation. Obviously this begins with a training potty, and Fisher Price’s My Potty Friend is as good a place to start as any, with a clicking “flush” lever, and an actual toilet paper roll holder. Furthermore, there should be some form of consistent reward system in place. Many parents opt for the “star system”, wherein a gold star sticker is placed on the calendar (one for number one, and two for number two, of course). When a certain number of stars have been reached, the child may be rewarded with anything from a new children’s book, to a trip to the pet store, so long as it is something that the child enjoys.

However, ultimately, the most important reward system in potty training is simply parental praise. Let your child know you love them, and let them know when you are happy with their progress.

GO-HOME JUNIOR Cartoon Wall Mirrors - Leroy (Lion)

We are giving away a GO-HOME JUNIOR Cartoon Wall Mirrors valued at AU$69.95 to the winner. To enter, simply answer the question and fill in your details at competition entry page.

Competition ends Thursday, 15th October 2009

Raising a new infant, especially for the first time mother, is both expensive and demanding. The National Children Study in the US has conducted a number of studies into the total stress a new mother must deal with, from conception to birth and through the first year of an infant’s life. While every mother will experience different stress levels based on factors such as income, marital status, employment and so on, pregnancy and motherhood are almost invariably amongst the most stressful periods in an individual woman’s life.

Furthermore, the cost of raising a child from birth to their first birthday, according to a survey conducted by Baby Center, an online resource for new mothers, will average a minimum of ten thousand dollars US, or about seven thousand AU. This is a minimum. For many mothers, it may wind up being several times this number. The average income amongst Australian households is said to be around fifty thousand dollars a year, but most Australians actually live in states with an average income of under forty thousand a year, and many are lucky to make half the average annual income in a year. In other words, seven thousand dollars as a bare minimum of what you can expect to pay for an infant’s first year of life can take quite a toll.

Make no mistake, having a child is also a wonderful experience, but it is just as stressful and expensive as it is joyful. As a friend or family member of a mother-to-be, it should be considered a duty, an honor, and a privilege to help lighten the load placed on the baby shower’s guest of honor.

This brings us to our second point: Selecting a gift for a friend or family member is something like solving a puzzle. Sometimes, the recipient will make it easy on you and let you know exactly what they need, but in any event, your goal is simply to select something that will be needed and useful.

While something utilitarian like, say, a vacuum cleaner, might immediately spring to mind, remember that, to put it bluntly, preserving the new mother’s sanity should be top priority. Something like a Fisher Price remote control musical monitor is helpful in this regard. The few minutes a mother has to herself in a day are valuable and precious. The musical monitor plays lullabies for the baby while allowing the mother to sit on the living room sofa with a cup of tea and just rest for a moment.

Then there are gifts to simply save the mother some money. Formula alone can cost up to one thousand dollars a year, so simply outfitting the mother with some necessities should be well appreciated. For example, simply providing the mother to be with an INFANTINO baby carrier or a full set of bottles and rubber nipples will save the trouble and money of buying them herself, and ensure that she is prepared for her new child the moment he or she is born.

In short, giving a gift should be seen as a gesture of love and consideration. There is no point in a person’s life that they need and deserve more love and consideration than when they’re expecting their first child.

It’s not difficult to get your younger kids to sit down and play a game of Chutes and Ladders with you, but just try dragging your thirteen year old away from the Xbox for a game of Candyland. It’s simply not going to happen. When you hit a certain age, flying jets and causing massive explosions in front of the TV just seems so much more stimulating than playing a board game.

This only contributes to the problem so many parents have during the teen years; how do you get your teens to spend quality time with you? What can you do to find some common ground between yourself and your kids and provide an enjoyable experience for both the parents and the teens?

Well, it’s not going to be playing Candyland, that’s for sure, but… something is certainly lost in the realm of video games. While they can certainly help you hone your “twitch reflex”, teaching you to snap your sights on some monstrous space alien with your laser cannon in a split second, the vast majority of games do not encourage much else in the way of personal or mental growth beyond developing that reflex. In other words, fast thumbs aren’t all there is to be gained from playing games.

Delving into game philosophy, many players of games like Chess and Risk emphasize gaming as a path of knowledge and self improvement, much like seeking a higher education or studying the martial arts. While games like Chutes and Ladders may be fairly limited in this regard, as they are largely simplified to be easier for young children to grasp and become good at (hence, teens finding them dull and unstimulating), the opposite is true of a game of Chess.

Strategic games like Chess, Risk and Stratego offer a practically infinite number of possible situations, and within those endless possibilities is an equally endless opportunity to improve at the game.

The ‘hook’ of these board games is the bitter taste of defeat, to be perfectly blunt. If you lose your first game of Chess to your father in less than five moves, it’s tempting to ask for a rematch, even if ten minutes ago you had referred to Chess as “That boring game that old guys play in the park”. As mythologist and Jungian psychologist Joseph Campbell put forth, there’s a strong desire in most children to earn their parent’s respect, and that includes trying to best them at games of their own choosing.

How skilled you are at a game may not seem very significant. After all, who ever made it into a top ranked university thanks to their undeniable skill at Scrabble? However, learning to improve at a game teaches several habits that can be applied in life. For example, learning to do away with bad habits of laziness. In a game of Chess, it’s tempting to put all of your focus on your Queen, your most powerful move, since that seems the quickest, easiest way to victory. However, no game of Chess has ever been won with a Queen alone. Setting up your pieces to utilize them to their full capacity requires patience, forethought and some degree of imagination.

As you develop a tendency to do away with lazy habits in a game you play regularly, this tendency will often find its way into your life, as well. Just as a martial artist might work for years on improving their punch, making it faster, more powerful. They may never actually get in a fist fight outside of the sparring ring, but by learning to spot their bad traits and habits and replace them with useful ones on the mat, they tend to take this approach to life, as well.

We are giving away a Mamas & Papas Push-Along Pip The Dog valued at AU$149.90 to the winner.

How to enter:

1. You must purchase at least one item from Yogee.com.au between 12:01 AM AEST on 01/08/2009 and 11:59 PM AEST on 31/08/2009; and
2. Only one entry per individual is allowed; and
3. Answer the question and fill in your details below; and
4. Make sure you include your order number with your answer

Enter competition

Giving a child a bath can be one of the most stressful and taxing parts of a parent’s day. It really shouldn’t be so difficult, but the fact is that most children find bathing to be profoundly boring. Even if a bath only lasts, say, ten minutes, how many children do you know who are willing to sit still for ten full minutes?

As adults, the morning or evening shower is a much-appreciated part of the day. Fifteen hours and forty-five minutes out of the day, we’re working, taking care of the kids, driving around, making dinner, and rarely have a moment to ourselves. The sanctity and the peace and quiet of a fifteen-minute shower, then, is, for many of us, our only chance to really unwind.

Children don’t see it that way. For young children, a bath is ten or fifteen minutes away from our toys, away from our favourite TV shows, and away from every other fun thing imaginable.

So bath time toys seem like an obvious solution. However, there is something of a psychology to this. Letting your kid bring some of their water-safe toys to the tub might keep them distracted long enough to get clean, but what you really want to do is teach them to actively enjoy bath time.

There are two simple steps to this:

1. Provide your kids with entertaining, stimulating toys for bath time, and
2. Only allow your kids to play with these bath time toys in the tub.

It’s a simple little psychological trick, but a useful one. They will associate some of their favourite toys with bath time, and will then learn to have fun in the tub. It’s not much different than, say, providing desert after dinner, so that children will start to appreciate eating healthy as an enjoyable experience by way of association.

It’s a good idea to start developing this notion early on with baby toys for the tub. Besides of course being bath-safe and fun, bath toys are also designed to teach kids to take delight in splishin’ and splashin’.

For example, there are a number of friendly sea-life toys, like a starfish with a spinning water wheel, and a lobster you can use to fill up and pour water out of. The reason these toys work so well is because they’re just not as fun to play with outside of the bathtub.

This comes down to one of the basic rules of selecting toys to encourage healthy behaviour and attitudes in children. That being that they encourage a certain type of play within a certain context. By getting your kids hooked on bath toys like these ones, they learn to associate the tub with fun and come to think of bath time as an enjoyable activity, and not, as many children see it, something of a chore.

Vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid is water soluble vitamin that is not stored in the body and must be replaced each day.  Kids need to ingest it from their diet or supplements (high doses of vitamins are not recommended).

Vitamin C is important for maintaining a healthy immune system, helps the body fight stress and enhances collagen production that are needed for healthy skin, cartilage, bones, teeth & connective tissue. It also helps in increasing iron and calcium absorption. Vitamin C acts as an antioxidant that helps to prevent free-radical cell damage that comes from environmental pollution, cigarette smoke, radiation, herbicides and unhealthy foods.

A deficiency of vitamin C can cause different types of diseases and sickness. Scurvy is the most common disease caused by severe and chronic vitamin C deficiency. Symptoms include fatigue, bleeding gums, loose teeth, bruising, dry hair and skin, poor wound healing, and anaemia.

Most fruits and vegetables contain some amount of vitamin C. Good sources of vitamin C including green leafy vegetables, citrus fruits, strawberries, broccoli, kiwi fruit, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, guava, blackcurrants, parsley and tomato.

The vital importance of playing and toys came to prominence in the psychological community thanks largely to the book Homo Ludens, or Man the Player, written by Johan Huizinga, a Dutch cultural theorist. Huizinga argued that playing is not merely for children, or “just for fun”, but the basic starting point for all personal development.

Huizinga’s book succinctly sums this whole approach to playing with a single sentence: “Let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing.” In other words, play serves as a form of practice and training, a way to exercise our body and mind without the actual stakes involved in “real life”.

An obvious example of play used in training would be flight school. A virtual flight simulator used to prepare pilots is, by definition, a video game, but it serves an important function in a pilot’s learning process in that the trainee is free to experiment and test the boundaries of his aircraft without actually putting his own safety at risk. When he’s finally put into the cockpit of the real airplane, he knows exactly what it can do the first time he takes the captain’s seat.

For young children, playing often works on a broader level in that they are still developing motor skills. A toddler plays with a bouncing rubber ball not because bouncing a rubber ball is a specific skill they’ll need later in life, but in order to develop body strength and reflexes.

Children begin with basic physical and sensory learning. If you observe an infant, you’ll see that one of the first skills they attain through play is the ability to grab. At this point, learning toys are simple; a soft blanket, a stuffed animal, anything that the child is able to interact with in a physical capacity. In regards to sensory learning, an infant simply needs sounds and images to stimulate them.

Beyond your child’s physical and sensory development, the brain, likewise, needs to be stimulated and kept in shape. Studies have shown time and again that people who are read to as children tend to do better in school and in their careers. Children’s books and regular reading sessions can make the difference between a child who enjoys the challenge of schoolwork and a child who finds schoolwork to be a chore.

In any context and for any individual, taking time to play is important and should never be neglected. There is perhaps no greater tool in learning. This is true in adulthood and much truer in early childhood.

Another reason for the age range is, of course, safety. Safety has more to do with physical development than mental or emotional development. The Haynes Internal Combustion engine is great for a kid who has grown strong enough to handle simple tools and carry slightly heavy parts. It’s recommended for kids aged eight to sixteen for reasons of both physical and mental development. A six year old would probably find it a bit cumbersome to put together when the engine block itself ways almost as much as they do.

If your six year old is the size of an eight year old, though, then you don’t have that to worry about. Safety issues are different from child to child just as mental development is different from child to child.

Under six years or so, though, you should probably be willing to treat these safety concerns as the gospel. Choking hazards are a very real threat, as are pointy, heavy, and delicate objects.

To break safety concerns down into age groups…

Infants

For baby toys, you really do want to regard the safety precautions with a lot of respect. Every toy you give a kid aged zero to twelve months needs to be a number of things in order to be safe. It has to be soft, it has to be devoid of anything like buttons that can easily snap off, and it has to be comfortable to cuddle with.

Toddlers

With toddlers, you want to avoid getting too complex with the toys. They can now handle plenty of toys with moving parts, but nothing easily broken, nothing with a lot of pointy corners, nothing that’s too heavy for them to safely lift, and you still want to be aware of choking hazards.

Small Children

Now it starts to get a little trickier. Some kids shoot up a foot or two between the ages of four and five, while others stay around the same size until they’re nearly seven or eight years old. At this point, you have to look at the safety precautions on the package and then exercise your own knowledge of your child’s development levels, physical and mental. And be honest with yourself! We all want to believe our kids are geniuses, but most five year olds just aren’t ready for a Technics Lego toy just yet. So try to stick to the recommended age range for now.

Here’s kind of a silly rule, but it’s a good gauge of your child’s physical growth. Next time you go grocery shopping, if your kid can easily carry a gallon of milk into the house and put it in the fridge without dropping it, he or she may be ready for toys recommended for eight year olds, but still, make sure to practice common sense and don’t give them anything that would make you nervous!