Brightest_Kidz: A Place 2 Learn

Welcome to Brightest Kidz.

There is nothing more important to me than my children. I have three. Lily, who as of this writing, is 5 years old (going on 30), Rowan, who is 4 years old and Quinn, who is 14 months.

Lily was born ready to rock. Even before she could crawl she didn't want to be held, she wanted to be put down so she could do something and go somewhere. She didn't know where she wanted to go, but she wanted to get there as fast as she could. We had to completely redesign (more like de-design) our house because if there was something to climb on, she would climb it. When she was only nine months old we would put her in a swing. She loved to swing. One day we discovered that although the batteries on the swing had died, the swing was still swinging under sheer Lily-Power! That the child has never (yet) broken a bone or cracked her head is sheer luck. Lily has dark brown eyes and long almost black hair. She runs from the moment she wakes up till she finally passes out at night. She is smart as a whip, opinionated beyond her years and pretty much considers herself queen of the universe.

Rowan is the complete opposite of Lily. Rowan loves unicorns and ponies. She sees fairies dancing in shafts of sunlight. She has wide blue eyes and hair that gets blonder and blonder over the course of the summer, then gets "streaked" during the fall and winter months. Rowan will spend hours playing with her ponies having tea parties and magical adventures. She also likes rocks and has a drawer full of them. Rowan gets along with everybody and pretty much lets her friends take the lead just as long as she can play. If Lily has an ancient soul, then Rowan's is brand new, freshly minted. The one area where Rowan and Lily are the same is their love of drawing and playing computer games and making crafts.

Quinn is sort of a combination of Lily and Rowan. He likes to play with his toys like Rowan (Lily never played with toys, she'd play with the boxes), but he likes to climb and is constantly trying to get either the television remote or the telephone. He is fascinated by buttons on devices and toys and loves to push them to see what happens. He also likes to help vacuum by turning the vacuum switch off and on. One thing he does that we thought was quite unusual is that he places his middle finger over his index finger and uses his middle finger to lift the tip of his index finger up forming a sort of oval hole shape. We call this "making the sign of the Q" which he tries to say when he does it. 

So where is all this fawning over my children leading? It is leading to this blog. Because our children are creative and smart, my wife and I try to buy them "toys" and other gifts that promote their creativity and intelligence. The main purpose of this blog is to share that with other parents who are also interested in providing their "brightest kidz" with products that help them be creative and learn. Each week I plan to review a new product that has been "brightest kid" tested and present the results here. I hope that by sharing this information other parents will be better informed about the options that exist for their Brightest Kidz.  

Why Brightest-Kidz?

As a child I hated school. I can still remember my father literally dragging me to kindergarden. I absolutely did not want to go. I didn't care much for junior high or high school either. I just wasn't that interested in what the teachers were trying to teach me. I couldn't relate it to the world outside the school's brick walls. In fact, it was not until I graduated from high school, spent a few years learning what the real world was like, and then going to university that I realized that I enjoyed learning. I enjoyed it because it was in college for the first time that I was learning something I was interesting in learning about and could see how it related to the real world. There was a goal at the end of my 4-years. Learn how to do this, graduate and get a job doing that. It all made sense. I remember telling my father when I was in 9th or 10th grade that I thought high school was a waste of my time. His response was that when I was older I would look back and realize that wasn't true. But here it is, many years later, and everytime I look back I can say without doubt, high school was a colossal waste of my time.

So how then did I come to writing a blog about learning? I come to it because a few months after I graduated from university I got a freelance copywriting gig at a company called Science Kit. This company sold science products to elementary, middle and high schools. My job was to write descriptions of their new products for their catalog - a once a year 1200+ pages monster. That first year they had 1500 new products that needed to be written about. The catalog was going to press in a bit under 12 weeks. I was the only writer they had. I immediately started grabbing new products, opening them, grabbing the instruction booklets and various other science reference books and gave myself a crash course in science.

 Flashback: I don't remember doing science in grade school. I'm not even sure we collected leaves. I don't believe I took any science courses in junior high. None I remember at any rate. I do remember taking a science class in my 9th grade year. I remember the teacher scrawling four mathematical formulas on the blackboard and that was our homework. I don't remember any specifics but I do remember having absolutely no idea what he was on about and getting a zero.

Flashforward: But this stuff was cool. I was amazed at just how cool the science products I was researching and writing about were. I kept thinking, where was this stuff when I was school? Why didn't my teachers use this kit to teach that subject or that one, or the other? Were my teachers really that bad? Was I really that poor a student? Was it a combination of?

It's now nine years later. I know more about science than the average Joe. That doesn't make me a science expert by any means, but I have a deep appreciation for science and what it means and how important it is. I see how interested my children are in the world around them. The animals, the plants the insects, the weather. I encourage them to explore and discover and collect specimens and to think about what they are seeing and hearing. I encourage them to learn and help them to understand that learning is fun, that knowing things is important. I want them to understand that the future is made of science. They seem to have taken that lesson to heart.

The goal of this website is to help others help their children discover the same thing.