Hoagies' Gifted Top Toys of 2011!

What were the top toys of the 2011 holiday shopping season? The press will tell you it's Angry Birds and Disney Princesses. Gifted kids often have different opinions, but this comes as no surprise to you. What toys and games excite our gifted kids this season?

Our countdown this inaugural year includes a wide variety of toys and games, featuring something for every age and play style. Young kids, construction champions, teens, strategists, word gamers and more... there's something for everyone!

Popular for the third straight year, Khet is the laser strategy game for kids and adults. It takes a subtle strategy to line up your pieces while you protect yourself from your opponent!

A perennial favorite for gifted kids of all ages (especially me!), SET makes the list again this year. Fun for all ages, SET is simple to learn: find a set of three cards where all the characteristics of the card are either alike or different. There are 3 shapes, in 3 different colors, with 3 different fills, and either 1, 2 or 3 of the shape on the card. But though it's simple to learn, just wait until your whole family or group is circled around the tableau of cards, all trying to be the first to spot a set of three cards that make up a SET! Great visual/spatial fun for all!

From Blue-Orange games, a new game called Spot-It makes the list for younger kids with rave reviews. Spot-It is comfortable as a 2-player game for a little quiet fun, or up to an 8-player for tons of party fun. And with 5 different variations to play, Spot-It never gets old!

Looking for a game that's tons of fun, and doubles as a 2e teaching tool? Rory's Story Cubes lets your imagination roll wild! Roll the nine dice, each with a different icon on each side, and look at the face up images. Pick an image to start your story. Beginning with "Once upon a time...", make up a story that somehow links all 9 face up images. There are no wrong answers!

Snap Circuits continues to engage gifted kids in construction challenges for young and old alike. Beginners can try Snap Circuits Jr. while older tinkerers will love Snap Circuits Extreme. No matter which version, there are tons of great projects to complete and experiment with!

MindWare provides three of our most popular board games: Q-bitz and Qwirkle. Q-bitz is visual dexterity, cubed. View a picture, and use your cubes to recreate the challenge exactly before your opponents do. Fast fun! And if you run out of challenges, you can get 100 more! Qwirkle is a bit like dominoes but with colors and shapes. It's easy to learn, but hard to master. Imaginets is a creative design toy for the youngest gifted kids. Use your imagination and the Imaginets magnets to create the designs on the 50 challenge cards, or create your own designs.

Looking for a quick card game, where the rules are different every time? You guessed it... Fluxx! Not only are the rules in Fluxx, but the versions are, too! This year's most popular versions include Fluxx 4.0, as well as EcoFluxx for our ecology-minded families, and Star Fluxx for our sci-fi aficionados.

Next on our countdown are Tekton Girder & Panel sets, including the Tower, Plaza & Hydrodynamic sets. Classic construction kits first introduced in the 1950's, these collections of columns, beams and side panels make building simple and educational. Of course the pieces are interchangeable, so each new set expands the last one.

Lego sets are ever-popular gifted-kid construction sets, and this year is no exception. The most popular this year are the Lego Architecture sets, with new designs for 2011. Don't miss the Burj Khalifa Dubai and White House sets among other great Lego Architecture sets!

The next most popular game is also from Out of the Box: 10 Days in... There are 10 Days versions for Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas and the USA, and they're all popular. 10 Days in... is a strategy game where you start with 10 tiles, and you must create a trip around... the geographic region of the game. Tiles include boats, planes and foot travel, as well as countries from throughout the region (or U.S. states). Follow the travel rules to create a seamless trip, and you win! This game, too, is popular in my house of teens+, as well as with my elementary-school aged nieces.

Thinkfun toys and games are also near the top of the list. Math Dice is a great pocket game for 2 or more, or even solitaire. Use the target dice (n-gons) to multiply to a target number, and the 6-sided dice to get as close to that number as possible. Decimals, fractions, they're all legal if you're the closest to the goal! Swish is a card game. Use your spatial sense to combine cards and remove them from the playing field. Each set of 2-12 cards you combine must match up perfectly so that every ball on one card swishes through a hoop of the same color on another card when the cards are all lined up neatly. It's a tricky little game! PathWords is a puzzle where Word Search meets Tetris. Place your pieces onto the challenge card so that the letters under each piece are a word, read either backwards or forwards. 40 challenges from Beginner to Expert, PathWords is sure to challenge everyone!

Rush Hour is the perennial favorite; slid the pieces around the board to help the car escape the Rush Hour traffic jam. Cars can only move either up and down or side to side, making it more than a little tricky to navigate the traffic. If you've mastered all 40 challenges, check out cards Set 2, Set 3, and Set 4, each with a new car, too! Gordian's Knot is a hands-on puzzle of only 6 pieces. Sounds simple, but you'll need 69 moves to get them apart. The second challenge is to get them back together again!

That's all the ThinkFun puzzles and games we'll mention here, but there are many more great ones. Visit Thinkfun to see them all!

The number two most popular is a card game, 7 Ate 9, from Out of the Box. 7 Ate 9 is simple enough to understand, but tricky to play... you have to think fast! Players add or subtract 1, 2 or 3 to or from the top card on the pile, and place a card from their hand that matches that number. Sounds simple, but if the top number is 2, and the add/subtract number is 3, you're looking for a 5 or a ... -1? No negatives, so you wrap-around to a 9. (Yes, for you math geeks, this is a mod 10 game.) Tons of fun for kids as soon as they can add and subtract single digits, right up through adult. My daughter always beats me!

The top toy for gifted kids this year is... (drum roll please)... Perplexus! Available for a limited time some years back, gifted kids adored Perplexus. Then it disappeared... and it's back! Perplexus is a marble maze encased in a plastic ball that you move, twist and turn to lead the small metal marble along the path, right-side up, upside down, and every which way, from start to finish. This year it's available in three flavors: the original Perplexus (with 100 challenges), Perplexus Epic (with 125 challenges) and Perplexus Rookie (with "only" 75 challenges). Mr. Hoagie is happy that Perplexus is back, because it's one of his favorites and his was broken at a gifted gathering a few years back. Great hands-on toy for young and old!

Hoagies' Page Top 10 articles...

You know Hoagies' Gifted Education Page for it's resources. Any question that you have about gifted, you can be assured that there's a page of answers on Hoagies' Page. Differentiation? Yup. Acceleration? Uh, huh. Underachievement? Definitely. Twice Exceptional? There's a whole section on that! Games and Toys for gifted kids? That's another whole section!

But did you know that Hoagies' Page also has articles, great reading, answers, success stories, research, and more, with authors from "just a parent" to world-renowned gifted professionals. Come visit for a few moments, and read the most popular articles on Hoagies' Page?

11. Advocating for a Grade Skip: A Portfolio of Research by Sandy. Sandy offers a great example of a portfolio showcasing the "whole child" in preparing for those sometimes difficult "grade skip" meetings...

10.5 So, the thing is…
I never wanted to be one of THOSE moms by Barbara Cooper. When I need a laugh, I read "So, the thing is…" by Barb Cooper. Do you feel like you've become one of "those moms?"

10. Why do my child's test scores vary from test to test? by Carolyn K. Intelligence vs. achievement tests, group vs. individual tests, tests from different publishers using different size and make-up of normalization populations... no wonder parents and teachers can't make heads nor tales of all the scores and how they compare!

9. Gifted Readers and Reading Instruction by Dr. David Levande. What should reading instruction for the gifted reader look like?

8. Parent's Unofficial Guide to Gifted IEPs and Gifted IEP Meetings by Todd McIntyre and Wayne Mery. In Pennsylvania and some other states, the gifted mandate requires that gifted children receive an individual Gifted IEP specifying their academic levels and needs. How can parents and teachers make this document worthwhile?

7. Why Should I Have My Child Tested? by Carolyn K. Why should a child be tested? How old should they be at test time? What kind of results are you hoping to get from the testing? Can testing now be difficult? These and other questions answered...

6. The 10 most commonly asked questions about highly gifted children by Kathi Kearney. Answers, too!

5. How Can I Prepare My Child for Testing? by Aimee Yermish. Aimee tells us what we should, and shouldn't, do to prepare our gifted kids for testing and assessment.

4. Assessing Gifted Children by Julia Osborn. This classic article compares simple testing with full gifted assessment... the difference is key.

It's gratifying to report that three most popular articles on Hoagies' Gifted Education Page, and five of the top ten, are all written by... Carolyn K. Me. Feels funny to say that. I think I need to go reread the links on Imposter Syndrome.

3. Testing and Assessment: What Do the Tests Tell Us?. A companion article to "Why Test?" continues the odyssey of testing and assessment and understanding the results.

2. What is Highly Gifted? Exceptionally Gifted? Profoundly Gifted? And What Does It Mean?. With today's tests it's not easy to find a clear demarcation, but differences are clear when you compare levels of gifted children. Labels don't matter, but planning for the gifted child's education must take his or her level of giftedness and resulting needs into account.

1. Reading Levels of Children's Books: How Can You Tell?. The answer is... it depends. There are more measures of reading level for children's books than you have fingers. Often, different measures give different results. Is the reported reading level based on vocabulary and sentence complexity, or on the length of the book, or the emotional maturity of the content? Does it matter? Find out here.

There are lots more articles on Hoagies' Page, Miraca Gross on aspects of acceleration, Kathy Kearney on highly and profoundly gifted, Linda Silverman on 25 years of gifted evaluations, Success Stories by parents and educators, and more. Be sure to stay a while and read!

Tell me, what other articles would you like to see on Hoagies' Page?

Hoagies' Page Top 10...

As you've noticed, I haven't had much to say on Nibbles and Bits. I'm hoping to change that, so I'm starting a new series of posts I'll call the Hoagies' Page Top 10. Top 10 lists are all the rage, and the Gifted community could use a few more, right?

To get myself going, I'm starting with an easy Top 10 list, one that's given me pause to think. With an average of over 4500 unique visitors worldwide daily, what are the Top 10 most visited pages on Hoagies' Gifted Education Page? A few of the pages surprised me... maybe you'll find some new surprises, too!

10. Hoagies' Kids and Teens Links. I'm glad to see this page on the Top 10 list, because it's a page near and dear to my heart. Kids & Teens Links are just that, links to great sites for our gifted kids and teens, organized by topic of interest. From the main Links page, kids can visit any of 23 pages of interesting, safe links, from Art, Theater, Music to Programming, from For the Love of Words to Brain Teasers, Logic & Optical Illusions, from Multiplication (and Other Arithmetic) Links to Engineering, Physics & Mechanics and more. There's even a special page with links for gifted Young Kids!

9. Educators, Counselors, Psychologists, and Administrators of the Gifted. Another heart-felt page, the Educators page was not one of the original pages. When I first started in advocacy, I met a few folks that gave me the impression teachers and parents were on opposite sides of the table, a "them vs. us" mentality. I quickly learned that this is untrue; we are all in the business of raising and educating our gifted kids together. At the same time I learned that teachers, doctors, psychologists and counselors are almost universally not trained in gifted children, and are facing the same steep learning curve we parents face. We're in this together!

Gifted Education, Gifted Programs, Curriculum Resources, Differentiation, Grouping, Gifted in Middle School, Counseling the Gifted, Special Topics, Profressional Books, Educational Theories, Brain Research and Learning Theories, Continuing Gifted Education Programs, Continuing Gifted Education Programs, and Gifted Help Wanted! are all available here.

8. Schools for the Gifted Child. A simple list of schools across the U.S. and world, either designed and implemented explicitly for gifted children, or recommended by gifted parents for their unique programs suited to the gifted child. At the top of the page, you'll also find links and an e-book all about selecting a school for your gifted child.

7. (Free) Online High School Courses. Originally collected immediately after Hurricane Katrina by Kathi Kearney, this page links to free high school, AP or college level courses, available in full right on the internet. Topics range from Calculus to American History, Politics to Chinese, Whether used as full courses, supplemental coursework, or enrichment materials, these courses may be free, but they are priceless resources for the gifted student and teacher.

6. Gifted 101: A Guide for First Time Visitors. This introduction to both giftedness and to Hoagies' Gifted Education Page is a great place to get started, and an easy way to learn about the resources on the 1100+ pages of the site.

5. An Inventory of Tests. An alphabetical list of all the tests and assessments you might encounter as the parent or teacher of a gifted child, with information and links about each measure. Is it a group or individual test? Is it an intelligence measure, an achievement test, or simply a survey about the child's characteristics? Is it explicitly for use with gifted children, or more commonly used for all children or just disabled children? These are all important questions!

4. Parents of Gifted Children. The original page of the site, this is the portal for parents and everyone who wants to learn about gifted children. Characteristics,
Identification, Testing, Highly Gifted, Traditional School, Home Schooling, Programs including Distance Learning, Saturday & Summer Programs, Talent Search, and College Planning, Parenting, Social/Emotional Aspects, Special Needs or Twice Exceptional, Gifted Support including Conferences and Gifted Online Communities, Gifted Books, Gifted Education Resources including Longitudinal Studies, Bibliographies and Journals & Magazines.

Frequently Answered Questions including Acronyms, Analogies, Early Graduation, Enrichment, Gifted Quotes, Grade Skipped and Successful, Never Say Bored!, Plateauing, Professionals and Psychologists recommended for their work with the gifted, Reading Levels, and Why Memorize Math Facts? among others, dozens of Success Stories and lots of things to smile at in A Lighter Note round out the Parents topics.

3. Hoagies' Kids and Teens is the Kids portal into Hoagies' Page. In addition to
Kids and Teens Links, find the Hot Topics Reading Lists, Smart Toys and Games lists, Movies that feature gifted kids in a positive light, Magazines, Nerd Shirts, Software, Contests & Awards, More Reading Lists, and Kids Speak Out, a publication area for the kids themselves.

2. Brain Teaser, Optical Illusions and Logic Links is the most popular of the Kids & Teens Links pages, with an amazing and entertaining collection of puzzles, games, optical illusions and more.

What is the most commonly visited page of Hoagies' Gifted Education Page? You guessed it: Hoagies' Gifted Education Page! Visit Hoagies' Gifted Education Page and see what you've been missing!

Spatial fun with Android apps

Our family amusement with saying "there's an app for that" has finally started to wane... So it must be time to share my findings with you. I've found apps for keeping my shopping lists, collecting all my store loyalty cards and even an to make my phone act like a magnifying glass. I've found apps to turn the Droid into a Kindle and a Bible. But some of my favorite apps are the free (and a few nearly free) games.

Any Droid game app list must begin with my favorite card game for gifted kids of any age: SET. (search the Market for Set Enterprises to get the real game). SET is the ultimate visual matching game. Match (or don't match) the shape, color, number and fill of the icons on each card to create sets of three cards where each of those characteristic is either the same or different on all three cards. But don't hand your phone to your gifted child... You may never get it back! Even with the SET app on my Droid, we still love to play the real SET card game at home.

How about a game of mirrors? Chromatron is the game of laser and mirror puzzles. Can you place and rotate the mirrors, combine the lasers, mirrors and filters to combine and separate colors, and reach all the targets in each tableau? Puzzles teach new skills along the way, like combining and splitting beams to create new colors. And then the puzzles really get Tricky!

Vexed Pro is a free chain reaction gravity puzzle. The puzzle is to get rid of all the cubes by sliding or dropping 2, 3 or 4 cubes into adjacent positions; touching matched cubes makes them disappear. Make each puzzle a little harder by making par, solving  the puzzle in the least number of moves possible. There are thousands of puzzles, from Beginner to Impossible and every level in between! Vexed Pro will keep you entertained for a very long time!

Rush Hour is a well known diversion for gifted kids (and their parents) from Thinkfun. In Rush Hour, puzzles get progressively harder as you try to free the red car from the traffic logjam. Cars can only move forwards and backwards, and may start the puzzle facing north-south or east-west, complicating the gridlock. The free version offers dozens of challenges, and the paid version, hundreds more. Rush Hour is must have for any Droid.

Space Physics is a Rube Goldberg puzzle combined with gravity. Can you move the ball to the goal wheel by adding shapes and forces to move it along? Draw quickly, or the ball will fall off the screen! But fear not, you can always start over. Again, the free version offers many challenges, but in case you run out, there's a paid version with tons more fun!

My latest find is Bubble Blast II. Another free app, Bubble Blast II challenges you to clear all the bubbles on the board with the least number of "touches." A touch turns the bubble touched to the next larger size and color, and if  the bubble turns red, it sends off chain reaction  bubble touches in all four directions. The puzzles start very simply, and get successively tougher. You can retry each puzzle as often as you like, but you will have to solve it to move on to the next harder puzzle.

Bubble Blast II even offers clues, but you can only receive one clue every 24 hours, and I suspect it will lower your overall score... I didn't try it to find out. There's also an arcade mode where time is of the essence. I'm more of a puzzle person myself.

Looking for a game that combines words and spatial strategy? Try Words with Friends! A favorite iPhone app now available on the Android too, Words with Friends lets you play that famous Hasbro word game with your friends on either phone platform, in your own time. Have a few minutes to wait at the doctor's office? Play your turn. Your friend (or a random stranger, if you choose) takes their turn when they have a chance. It's a fast way to turn a minute of lost time into a thought-provoking social activity!

That's all for today... I'm sure these games will give every Android user more than a few hours of lost, or saved, time. Next column, great word games for the Android.

And if anyone would like to offer Hoagies' Page an iPad or iPod Touch, we will offer similar columns for iApps! ;-)

If we don't tell them they're gifted, they'll never know

It's the hot topic of the week... should we identify the gifted child as "gifted?"  Should we label him?  Once she's identified, should we share the "gifted" label with her?  Or should we ignore this aspect of the child, hide the identification if we do become aware of it, and pretend that there is nothing unique about the gifted child?

The answer is so obvious, it makes me wonder why we're asking the question!

Let me ask this another way. If you have a son, do you label him a boy?  If you don't, will he eventually figure it out?  You bet!  What if your daughter is good at soccer?  Do you help her grow and hone her skills, sign her up for clinics to improve her play, and allow her to try-out and play in the elite travel soccer team?  Or do you have her stay in local youth soccer, playing alongside the average soccer players instead, as her soccer peers go off to the travel team?

The answer is clear.  We can't hide the child from himself for very long; to think we can is just silly.  That boy is going to figure out that he is more like the other boys than like the other girls.  There are obvious physical differences. The child may be a boy, blond, brown-eyed and tall, and not telling the child that he is all of these things will not change that he is.  And he will certainly figure it out for himself.

How about that young soccer star?  No one tells a parent of a child who has a talent in sports not to label the child talented in that arena.  No one frowns at the parent who allows his child to play in elite programs or encourages his child through advanced skill clinics. No one counsels the parent, "No, don't enroll your child in the travel soccer team; it might make her age-peers in the youth soccer league feel bad."

But isn't this exactly what is asked of the parents of gifted children?  Some education professionals suggest that we should not identify our gifted children at all, that gifted identification creates excessive expectations for the gifted child.  These excessive expectations of their teachers and parents might pressure the child in ways that aren't good for her, ways that might "take away her childhood."  Others tell us that, once identified, we should not share that identification or its implications with the gifted child.  "Don't tell your son he's gifted, it might give him a big head."  "Don't put your child in the gifted program; it might make the kids in the regular classroom feel bad."

If we do not label the child "gifted," he'll never know, right?  Wrong.  Gifted kids are different.  The differences vary from child to child.  Often, the gifted child is more sensitive than his age-peers.  What is the gifted child to think?  I'm supposed to be just like them, but none of them care about or even notice the homeless people on the street, none of them are overwhelmed by the bright lights and loud noises in the school gym... Why am I so different?  And as the gifted child quickly learns, different is bad.  Suddenly we've gone from not telling the child he's gifted, to giving the child the impression that he is bad.  We should never do that to a child!

If we ignore the talents the gifted child shows in academics, and we do not encourage him to join the gifted classroom or program... what are we saying to the child?  Kids, all kids, need encouragement.  They need to know they're accepted for who they are.  They need to stretch, to learn and to grow.  The parents of that young soccer star know that, and they enroll her in the travel soccer team to get that encouragement and growth.  But the parents of the gifted boy are not supposed to label their son "gifted" and enroll their him in the gifted program, where he might be accepted, encouraged, and learn to stretch his abilities?

Why not?

Carolyn K.

Who, me? Opinions??

Welcome to my blog!  Wow, that sounds funny to say.  I swore I would not get started blogging.  I mean, do I really need another thing to do with my time?  There's the website, and now the Facebook page, and my family, not in that order, of course.  That's more than enough for a disabled mom to handle.  And who would want to read my posts anyhow?  I don't know the answer to that one, but I guess we'll find out together.

As most of you know, I'm passionate and opinionated about Gifted Education.  And as many of you know, I'm not very skilled at keeping my mouth shut.  What better way is there to share our passion and our opinions than to blog about it?

So here we are together, you and I, writing and reading my first blog post.  I hope that you'll follow me along this journey, and share my passion for "all things gifted."  And I hope that at least a little bit of what I say can help you, your children, your students, your teachers, and our world to be a better place for our gifted children and the amazing adults they grow up to become!  And the adults WE grow up to become!  (Imposter syndrome is a subject we'll definitely discuss here.)

Welcome to Hoagies' Nibbles and Bits, a blog about... well, about whatever I'm feeling passionate about at the moment. Mostly, that's likely to be about gifted children, and gifted education, and gifted parenting. Once in a while, I'm sure there will be posts on other subjects, too. Feel free to comment on my posts; I would love to know what you're thinking, and what you think of my opinions. Let's take this journey together!

Carolyn K.