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Each Goldiblocks kit comes with a story book that explains the kit, why the characters need to build XYX, and the basic engineering principles behind how to build XYZ. That was one of the major ideas behind the toy series - giving them the "elaborate narrative" with one example of how to build with the stuff and then letting the kids loose on their own.

I have a nine year old girl. She built a bench out of pressure treated lumber left over from a fence we put in last week. Her favorite thing to do is to build rube goldbergesque multi step machines in the house. She's gone to 1 day "camps" where she soldiered robots together. She builds logic gates in Minecraft. She agrees, these are ****** toys. They are part of the problem. There was a good idea initially that was ********** to oblivion by marketers so they could sell enough to turn a profit. Buying your kid a bucket of legos by the pound is a far far far better choice if you want them to engage in the kind of play that gets girls interested in engineering.

People gave money to "yay girl engineers" and got ******* Lego Friends Now With 4 Moving parts! As toy sets these will get more and more cartoonish and less and less "engineering" related until they're basically Moon Landing Barbie. Better than an American Girl doll? Sure Better than a box of wooden blocks? Not remotely.

If it's not frilly, puppies, princesses, then it's not for girls. Goldieblox doesn't seem to do anything to avoid that stereotype. Like Nerf's new girly foam gun line, all Katnissy. Gotta be pink and purple to get girls to buy them.

Which there's an argument for, that these toys are subverting "princess culture" by camouflaging creative play toys in "girl" colors. The problem is: that's not what's happening with GoldieBlox. No idea about the Nerf thinger. Hannah has Nerf swords and guns, but we bought them before there was a "girl" version. She may have preferred those.

When I was a kid I loved matchbox cars and micro machines and it took much metaphorical arm twisting to convince my parents I wanted those instead of dolls. Maybe if some of them had been pink I'd have had an easier time.

I also did really love pink and purple.

She'll make a fine lesbian.


God, I hope so, that would be so much easier.

The funny thing is, my son (the six year old) loves pink and purple and he finds it hard to find cool boy toys (so to speak) in those colors...

The kids are really into Legos right now, mostly because of the movie, they also have a Thomas train set. They have absolutely no interest in building things with either of them. If daddy doesn't build it, it doesn't get played with for the most part. I plan to keep encouraging to those ends of course, and maybe things will change as they get older, but to some point I'm just going to let girls be girls.

Just buy the kids tablets and call it a day.

This is still a thread about a TV show to teach reading, right?

Now it's an app.

A pretty good one too, if you feel like paying the subscription. Cutting out the poor.

Yo, Levar, I'm really happy for you, but Marian the Librarian was the best story-monger of all time! Of all time!!

My son entered kindergarten with a 2nd grade reading level, thanks to lots of Frog and Toad the previous two years. Then he's got his Kindle with a bunch of games and creative/drawing apps, and of course ebooks - The Ugly Ducking and Alice in Wonderland are the first ones that come to mind. Oh, and Roblox and Minecraft of course. The buckets of actual legos I had to confiscate because he had a habit of dumping them all out then losing interest and never picking them up.

My little one has a bunch of reading apps/e-books. He's very into the Little Critter line these days. He has them in actual book form as well and has us read them to him at night but then has the tablet read them during the day when he's playing with that. Plus some other assorted educational apps and his major entertainment on the tablet these days is Toca Cars.