After our food, we would sit for a while to let our food digest (all of 2 seconds) before gathering our things and lumbering up to Toys R Us to locate them. They would inevitably be in the same old aisle, depending on what is their obsession at the moment. Once it was Thomas the Train and all the many train characters (Percy, James, Toby, Diesel, Flynn etc) or the more expensive train sets, then it was Star Wars and now it is Pokemon. I find it weird that the toy stores here haven’t caught on to selling Pokemon paraphernalia yet. Perhaps they all predict it is just a fad that will disappear, or the shops had no reaction time as to how hot it will become, or the company didn’t realise this was a lucrative marketing strategy. Anyway I just know that if they started selling Squirtle water bottles, Staryu bags or Eevee cushions, my boys (and me) would be clamouring for them and snapping them up for sure.
So after buying them enough train sets and Star Wars X-wings, Tie-fighters and lego sets to start a small museum, I found myself wandering through other parts of the shop in the hopes of finding other meaningful and fun toys that might engage my boys, with rather limited success. Sometimes I also walk around Kiddy Palace and some other toy shops, to check out their toys collection. It struck me after a while that most of the toys in these toy shops are the same and they all tend to be the convergent toys, meaning there is only one or a few ways to play with them. For example, train sets have only one way of playing with them, many dollhouses (eg Hello Kitty house, Peppa Pig house) have limited ways you can move around the furniture and place the characters, cooking sets where the fruits and vegetables can only be cut in half, and even Lego sets all come with precise instructions now on how to assemble the pieces to get the toy on the cover. There are still the age-old toys like colouring sets, beads, playdoh and toy guns and figurines fashioned after some character (eg superhero, Barbie, some collectible), which you can play with however many ways depending on your imagination, and my kids do like colouring, but aside from that, if your kids are not into those toys, that leaves very little to buy. I tried hunting for divergent, creativity enhancing toys, things which have many many different ways of playing with, but only came up with tangram (such a dull set of pieces, all in one colour and they are quite small and flat which makes it hard to manipulate and they don’t stay put), other forms of blocks, and other educational games which either teach you to spell or to count.
To be fair, you could get the rarer, less common toys if you go to a more inaccessible mall like Tanglin mall or Parkway Parade. I happen to know there are toy shops there that carry more variety of toys, although I must say many still fall under the category of convergent toys. They are nicer-looking convergent toys, but nothing really inspired or jumped out at me there too.
I recently found myself fantasising of the toys I would make if I could. They include:
•Lego bricks that actually have detail on them, eg blocks that suit Roman architecture style, Greek architecture, English cottage style, European castles etc. I used to have a set of building blocks with such pictures on the side but I lost them and can’t find anything like that anymore.
•Dollhouses where the furniture is not one piece but made up of different pieces and styles that you can mix and match, eg the types of legs on the chair or table, the type of cushions and sofa covers you use, different types of lamps, and get this – the characters should have fully movable body parts – waist, arms, legs, head, so you can make them adopt an infinite variety of poses. They can be standing over a stove and cooking, or kicking back and relaxing on a sofa with a tub of ice cream in hand haha, or working on a laptop or sweeping the floor. Wouldn’t that be great? Then you can really do role play and inspire future interior designers🙂
So, I decided last night (when my hubby is overseas again and it is up to me to entertain the kids) to come up with my own humble creativity toy. I borrowed the idea from a girl’s colouring book I saw in Urban Write (the Popular offshoot) where it showed girls in various types of outfits, and hairstyles, but the fun part was how they cut every character in half and you can flip the pages to mix and match tops and bottoms to get new outfit. Some work really well, and some just don’t. I know I spent an inordinate amount of time flipping through all the pages because I was so fascinated. So I did a boys version (no they do not have such a thing, sadly), using Pokemon, their craze of the day, to boot. I was quite pleased with the result, I must say.
So it looks like this.
As part of creativity is mixing two things that are different together and coming up with a new thing, I drew a few of their favourite Pokemon characters on a spiral notebook (the third one is Blastoise, by the way), cut them up into three sections – head, body and legs, but ensuring they are still attached to the spine, and then I showed them how you can flip the pages and have different combinations of Pokemkn characters – eg a Squirtle with Staryu legs, which I called Squiryu. Or a Staryu with a Squirtle body, which I called Startle, haha.
The trick is to make sure the body parts all end at the same points at the page edges so the final character looks seamless. Initially the boys were upset that I cut up their beloved characters, but later I found Hao Yi, my younger boy, flipping through the pages on his own and hopefully, enjoying the different combinations. As you can see, my next step is getting them to Colour them which they are in the midst of doing.
However I do want to add that actually one of the best ways to foster creativity in kids is actually, not to give them any screens, and leave them to their own devices. You may find that they go through an initial frustration mode, and complain that they are booooored, and start rifling through the house for that remote or handphone, but if you stick it out (and you must have faith to do so!), they should eventually be forced to entertain themselves by coming up with something. Heck, impoverished kids who are not exposed to any toys can even make a game out of breadcrumbs, and I used to talk to myself when I was utterly bored, so don’t underestimate the power of forced downtime and open imagination. Of course, telling them stories, reading books (fiction and non-fiction) and talking to them about things around them help to give their minds more fodder to chew on, but stretches of time with nothing to do – it’s an invitation for the mind to come up with new things.
Hope it gave you some ideas for things to do with kids!
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