SCIENCE-BASED PARENTING

Today is Black Friday.  I’ve been up since 4am helping my FIL buy a 42″ flatscreen at Wal-Mart.  I ordinarily wouldn’t voluntarily visit a Wal-Mart on any day, let alone on a day when the place is swelling with rabid shoppers, but family comes first.

For those of you who are snobby science-loving shoppers, like myself, I have three gift ideas picked out to recommend.  Please understand that I have not used these products or tested them myself.  These are just the coolest looking science toys that I could find.  I recommend that you read the reviews for each product before taking my blind advice.

I think the best science toys explain not only “what we know”, but “how we know what we know”.  That’s why I am excited about the Milestones in Science kit by Thames & Kosmos.  This kit will walk you and your child through the history of scientific discoveries and help you reproduce the very experiments that had our wise ancestors saying “EUREKA!”.  I love the concept.  I can only hope that they executed it well.

Charlie’s Playhouse has Darwin-inspired toys that engage young minds about evolution, including a giant time line with info cards of several ancient creatures.  This gift really helps young minds understand our diverse ancestral tree of life, and gets the kids thinking about fact-based reality before the phone book ripping zealots can brainwash them.

This being a skeptic blog, I do want to encourage logic and reasoning, which is why the last gift I’m recommending is the new incarnation of Clue called Clue Suspects.  This seems like a neat twist on the classic game, except instead of using process-of-elimination, the game is played by using reasoning and deduction.  This is meant to be a solitaire game, so it’s perfect for the only-child.  I like the idea, it sounds like fun, and I think I found the perfect Secret Santa gift.  Sh… don’t tell.