KidShack Clothing

For the Tots and Tweens in your family. Trendy casual attire, sizes 12-16 for girls 18-20 for boys. We also carry shoes and a variety of accessories.

Planet Kids

Our goal at Planet Kids is to exceed your expectations and provide quality, value and service with a variety of award-winning educational toys and games.

Product Review – Science Kits for Young Kids

Now that the holiday craziness has wound down and we are back to normal around our house, we are also back to our regular theme action when it comes to our home learning with the tiny person. She got a challenging diagnosis at the end of December and we knew this year was going to [...]

Product Review – Preschool Learning Games

I often have this naïve notion that anything educational I bring home will be received with stellar enthusiasm and a rousing round of “Mommy, you are so stinking cool”.
Obviously, this notion is something I entertain in the privacy of my own mind, since 90% of the time I offer the 4-year-old – who has completely [...]

Nature Craft – Flower Chains

Good morning! It’s that time of year where the big debate in our house over what flowers can and cannot be picked rages wild.
Pretty much, our kiddo would prefer to pick every flower in sight.
Wild, someone else’s, grandma’s favourite in the garden – it doesn’t matter. Flowers should be for picking, she believes.
Since not everyone [...]

Books for Tom Boys & Spring

Good morning. It’s super late for me to be getting going this morning (8 a.m., yikes!). I am totally dragging my butt today in the work universe, mostly because I have plans to ditch the office long enough to spend the ENTIRE DAY outside combing beaches, roaming trails and wrapping it all up with a [...]

Crafty Imagination – Easter Masks

Is anybody else dealing with some seriously crazed kiddos lately? I’m hoping there’s something in the air and our tiny person hasn’t gone completely bonkers because she’s more than a wee bit wound up these days.
Normal, relatively quiet crafting that would normally take place around our house is not even an option at the moment. [...]

Book Review – Art Science & Messy Math

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived a kid who wanted to move her life to one centrally scientific and seriously fun location – Science World.
Somewhere between the dinosaurs and Lego land, her brain engaged the science universe (or at least the serious fun universe) and now there’s no turning [...]

KidSports – Our Hockey Preschooler

How could I forget that day two Octobers ago when Ken and the tiny person hit the ice for the first time.
It was love at first sight – for both of them.
The trainer skates we’d picked up for our daughter seemed the perfect way to start her off easy. But, she’d have none of this [...]

Home Learning – Life Cycles for Preschoolers

OK, so there are a couple realities to working on “learning” projects with a preschooler:
1. Attention span that generally amounts to nanoseconds
2. The constant reminder that 37-year-old mom obviously knows far less than 3.5-year-old child
3. Permanent mess syndrome
4. Sitting at the dining room table is the LAST thing on anyone’s mind when the sun is [...]

Preschool Craft – Marble Painting

Editor’s Note: While we usually run our homeschooling column this first Tuesday of the month, we are trading Tuesdays in order to welcome our newest OBE partner – Let ‘Em Loose Play Land.
This fun family-friendly, energy releasing indoor play land in Campbell River has re-opened to the public full time and we are excited to [...]

Usborne Learning Books Bring Reality to Life

Editor’s Note: I totally forgot to post this earlier. I’ve got free Usborne toddler books That’s Not My Truck and That’s Not My Train for random commenters today. So, jump in!
There we were in the bathroom at the Courtenay library, camped out in the last stall trying to take care of business before story time [...]

Story Boxes for Kid Storytelling

Storytelling is big around our house. The tiny person is totally into making up her own universe filled with adventures, conversations, friends and a bit of drama to keep it interesting.
I’ve always been excited about her penchant for telling tales. But, there are definitely times when the stories veer off into the “We’ve obviously been [...]

Love Stories of Fall

Fall is magic. Even when the blustery wind and endless rain sets in, the contrast of perpetual gray against the brilliance of the golden hills and mountainsides makes us all want to stand there a bit in awe.
OK, not too much, as days like the last few remind me that we are headed into a [...]

To Nap or Not to Nap, the Drama

I don’t even remember what it was like to have our daughter nap on a regular basis.
The occasional act of God does occur, with her crashing for hours on end with no sign of waking while her go-go disposition refuels. But, when my friends who have 3+ year-old kiddos who are still napping in the [...]

Making Bookmarks to Track Our Tales

Our daughter loves stories.
From the second she pops her head up in the morning until she falls asleep to them at night, yarns about everything from how monsters make nutty butter to the vacations her collection of puppets are on float through the air non-stop.
She is ALWAYS making something up, building imaginary cities, talking with [...]

Homemade Matching Games

Our daughter loves to match.
You wouldn’t guess it from her willingness to throw outrageous outfits together on a whim (although, they are amazingly colour coordinated).
But, she is methodical about discovering how things go together in a pattern, texture and colour sort of way.
She’ll spend literally hours making piles of buttons, shells, ribbon, anything she can [...]

When Preschool Gardening Gives Way to Absentmindedness

Bad news first: I have no brain.
It has been missing since about six months into pregnancy…and it is now becoming painfully apparent that its continued decline is starting to effect our day-to-day well being.
…at least when it comes to gardening.
After our unfortunate leaving-outside-overnight incident last week, I lovingly put the sprouts back on the front [...]

Our First Preschool Garden Casualty

The whole gardening-for-the-first time is bound to have some seedling drama.
Today, we had to officially say goodbye to our lettuce, which struggled long and hard after the transplant (note to self: plant lettuce directly into the ground)

It was a sad, solemn day as we had hoped that somehow by magic everything we planted would live [...]

The Preschool Garden Replant

Today’s comment challenge: What were your favourite childhood family projects? Do you build those into your family life today?
Reesh, you definitely score in the comment department. A Log’s Life is yours! Today, I’ve got a cool dinosaur puzzle for one random commenter. So, jump in and win!

There’s nothing like digging in the dirt.
Kiddos know that [...]

Sprouts – A Preschool Gardening Journal

There’s nothing like digging in the dirt.
For weeks around our house the gardening hats and wooden bugs have been planted and re-planted on the living room floor. Her afternoon “gardening” sessions haven’t resulted in anything edible or sprouting, but one thing was clear – our daughter’s itch to get some soil between her toes had [...]