by Tier018

If your looking to find a laser, I found this sight called thinklasers.com on a google search. They offer some of the most powerful lasers I’ve ever seen. I purchased a Think Series 200mW 532nm Green laser, and its a good thing it came with some safety goggles. This laser is incredible, like holding a light saber but I can take it under water. I can’t imagine how bright the 300mW Think Series 532nm green laser is. They had 40mW hand held Blue under water lasers also.

By: Valerie Giles

A child’s imagination is something to be encouraged and treasured. Young children learn many skills through imagination, from independent play, interactive play, language and cognitive skills to name a few. Pretend play and dress up are wonderful ways to allow your child to dream and act out all sorts of fun adventures.

There are a wide variety of excellent toys available to enhance their imaginative experiences some of which include; cooking and baking toys, dress-up costumes, gardening toys, housekeeping toys, money and banking sets, spy gadgetry toys, tools and puppets.

Your child probably watches you preparing and cooking meals everyday. There are many cooking and baking toys available that allow your child to have hours of entertainment. Some of the wonderful toys manufactured are; picnic baskets (complete with play bread, cheese, lettuce, hot dog and bun, ketchup, corn on the cob etc.), bakery sets, plastic food sets, a wide variety of tea pot sets, pots and pans, dinnerware sets (complete with plates, utensils, bowls and cups) and coffee sets. It’s easy for your child to set up their own little imaginary kitchen with ovens that actually bake cookies, working mini refrigerators, plastic refrigerators, microwaves, stoves, barbecue’s and toasters. Little shopping markets complete with plastic store items and cash registers can be purchased, along with gum ball machines and sno-cone machines, the list really is endless.

Dress up play is a favorite among all ages of children, whether it’s dressing up in dad’s baseball uniform or having fun with mom’s closet. There is a great variety of all sorts of different types of costumes, masks and accessories for children to select from. Costumes come in designs such as fireman and police uniforms, doctor and veterinarian uniforms, engineer suits, magic hats with cape and gloves, dresses, waitress outfits, cherubs, devils, witches, ballerina and popular character suits with capes and muscle chests to name a few. Great accessories such as crowns, tiara sets, ninja swords, light sabers, cowboy hats, purses complete with keys and cell phones, doctor and medical kits and magic kits can be found. Dress up play allows your child to use their imagination in a fun way through role play and acting out adventures.

For all the young outdoor landscaping enthusiasts there are wonderful gardening tools and accessories available. Little wheelbarrows are made in plastic and metal designs (tiny metal designs look and work as well as the adult counterparts), both helpful at removing dirt, weeds and gravel around the yard. Metal and plastic gardening pails, watering cans, mini gardening sets (complete with mini rake, shovel and trowels), gardening aprons, gardening totes with seeds (mini rake, shovel, trowel and pail), gardening rakes, shovels and gardening gloves can also be purchased. Other adorable gardening sets include planters, seeds and tiny fairy cottages ready for planting around.

Probably the only time your child will enjoy housekeeping is when they are young. Most children seem to love helping out mom or dad with cleaning and simple household chores. With this said you’ll find many housekeeping toys to keep your child busy and entertained for hours on end. Vacuums, cleaning sets (complete with broom, mops, gloves and pails), talking irons and ironing boards, working sewing machines and clothes washers are a few of the items to be found.

An encouraging and fun way to help children understand early on how money works is to have them play with money and banking toys and games. There are a variety of cash registers available complete with play money, fake credit cards, price scanners, price check microphones and readouts offering learning opportunities for several skills from motor skills, mathematical skills and cognitive skills.

Today there are more spy gadgetry toys available than ever before. There are spy listeners (allowing children to listen in on other rooms or to use as stethoscopes), detective sets, mini keyboard transmitters allowing children to send text messages to each other, spy goggles, motion detector sets with infrared sensors, spy cameras available in sunglasses or wristband styles (complete with real film) and walkie talkies. Spy pens come with a variety of options from activated motion alarms, flashlights and magnifying glasses. These toys not only offer hours of entertainment but toys such as the motion detectors and infrared sensors teach children basic electronic skills.

Kids love to do things around the house just like dad or mom, especially anything to do with tools. Complete tool sets for children are available with tool belts, tool chests and tool boxes. Any tool imaginable from saws, levels, planers, wrenches, screw drivers, drills and hammers can be found. Workshops (complete with bins to store tools) with work horses and work benches can provide the base for all your child’s building adventures. And for when your child ventures outdoors to do some work there are mini working wheelbarrows, weed trimmers, lawnmowers, rakes, shovels, hoes, chain saws (with sound effects) and leaf blowers to complete the job. Of course you’ll want to be sure they always wear their hard hat.

Lastly, another popular part of pretend play is the use of puppets. Puppets can be found in hand puppet, finger puppet, bath puppet, baby puppet, pop-up and marionette designs. Along with puppets there are puppets accessories and wonderful puppet theaters to add to the fun. There is no end to the available puppet designs from cartoon characters, fantasy (fairies, wizards), people and animals (aquatic, birds, bugs, dinosaurs, dogs, farm animals, fish and frogs to name only a few). You and your child can either make a puppet theater or purchase one of the many puppet theaters offered from tabletop theaters, floor standing, doorway and marionette theaters. Pop-up puppets are a fun way to play peek-a-boo with a child or hide and seek. Puppets are a great way to interact and have imaginative play with your child.

Imaginative play is an important part of play. Role playing and dress up allow children to experiment with the different roles of the people they observe. The toys and accessories that surround your child will let them identify with different characters and try out various domestic roles. Imaginary play helps children to adjust more easily to the challenges of our everyday world.
 
About The Author…
Valerie Giles owns and operates Toys-4-Kids; Educate your child through play, a web site full of resource information and online toy stores. Purchase the right educational toys for every child, from baby toys to outdoor toys, as well as Barbie Collectibles. www.toys-4-kids.com
Article Source: Family

By David Ristuben

Why do we write? Well, that’s a highly personal question for which each person needs to look inside him or herself to find the answer, but I would guess that, in many cases, it is a way to set aside “everyday” life for a while and retreat into a setting of your own creation. After all, when you’re writing a story, you don’t describe all the routine things people do everyday, because the reader doesn’t need or want to hear about all that, as it is a regular part of life. Characters in stories have to use the restroom just like normal people, but how often have you read about them doing it? As a writer, you don’t relate every moment in the day; only aspects of your characters’ lives that are interesting and pertinent to the story.

As another example, television shows often dramatize certain professions. One example I can think of is the now-cancelled “Boston Public.” Winslow High School had an awful lot of problems — several every week, in fact. Anybody who watched and interpreted this show as a documentary of the American school system missed the point and should have gotten their information elsewhere. We didn’t spend an hour watching teachers grade papers or give lectures, because who would be interested in that?

But, returning to the matter at hand, we want to forget about our “normal” lives for a while and create our own tale, and this is especially true of the fantasy genre. You don’t have to be writing about Hobbits and hobgoblins or dungeons and dragons for your work to be considered fantasy. If your story takes place in a fictional world, then that is obviously fantasy, but if you are writing about our otherwise “real” world, then anything that is outside of our typical understanding of the way things are — or, in the past, were — supposed to be can be considered fantasy.

As a starting point in discussing science fiction, I think it might be beneficial to begin with a dictionary definition. According to Dictionary.Com, science fiction is “a literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background,” which means that science fiction is a sub-genre of fantasy. It is merely a type of fantasy that has become very popular, and therefore deserves its own designation. Stories with magic and mysticism in the past or present are what I will henceforth refer to as “fantasy” stories, even though, as I have said, that label encapsulates much more.

The idea of the “good old days” doesn’t just exist in the minds of groups of elderly men sitting around tables in small town cafés, reminiscing about the way things used to be; that sentiment is present in people of nearly all ages. We long to return to the days of our youth, to a simpler time, to an age of innocence when we thought anything was possible. We want to think that there’s something more magical to life.

Of course, when looking back on the past, we tend to focus on the good over the bad. We have a romantic view of medieval Europe, full of its knights, wizards, and princesses, so we often overlook the numerous hardships that accompanied living in those times. A fantasy story can provide all the escape that we yearn for while still keeping us safe from marauding Mongolian hordes and the Bubonic Plague.

Since science fiction stories involve elements such as “speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets,” it is almost certain that they would take place in the present or future, so one can easily understand why science fiction is a popular alternative to typical fantasy. Even though science fiction, like fantasy, brings us out of our usual world, science fiction will often not be far from reality, especially in the case of “hard” science fiction. If the story involves some kind of discovery or change, then the plot would probably be centered on the ramifications involved with it. As we know, some scientific discoveries can pose ethical and moral dilemmas — cloning is a classic example.

In some science fiction stories, like 1984, we view a dystopian civilization, and by seeing how such a society developed, we can hopefully learn how to keep the fiction from ever crossing over to fact. Other science fiction stories, meanwhile, paint a portrait of a utopian society, and we could possibly learn from their examples. It should be noted, however, that the words “utopia” and “dystopia” are highly subjective. One person’s dream could be another person’s nightmare. In any case, science fiction may be fantasy, but it is often anything but irrelevant to our current lives, for it shows how the decisions we make now could affect our future.

This isn’t to say that fantasy is more trivial than science fiction, though. Some tales use fantasy as an allegorical tool to comment on issues that strike very close to home. Gulliver’s Travels is a prime example. Gulliver is traveling to exotic lands and having adventures, but at the same time, Jonathan Swift is delivering a scathing commentary on human society. In the first quarter of the story, Gulliver finds himself in the land of Lilliput, which is at war with Blefuscu over the correct way to eat a boiled egg. This war between islands of six-inch-tall people is a satire of small, petty, trivial European rivalries, such as that between Britain and France.

In the second quarter, he is in Brobdingnag, a land where giants reduce European society and its accomplishments to the point of insignificance. In the third quarter, he winds up on the flying island of Laputa, as well as several other places, and this part of the story satirizes academia and science. Finally, Swift ridicules the entire human race in the fourth quarter, which takes us to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent, noble, and peaceful equine (horse-like) creatures who rule over the uncivilized “Yahoos,” who are essentially no different than humans. By writing this satire in the guise of a fantasy story, Swift was able to attack society without directly stating his views. Besides, as one may hear in the writing world, it’s often better to show than just tell.

So far, I have discussed fantasy and science fiction separately, but they are not mutually exclusive. In Star Wars, for example, we see light sabers. They are the stuff of science fiction but are also clearly reminiscent of the metal swords of ancient and medieval times. If you’re thinking in practical terms, light sabers would be no match for guns — which is why you don’t see people fighting with swords today — but that would be missing their intention. Light sabers remind us of the days of more “honorable” and traditional warfare, before the time of long-range nuclear missiles and machine guns, when opponents would duel each other face to face and the outcome of the battle would come down to pure individual skill. Combining elements from both fantasy and science fiction demonstrates our desire to move into the future while still holding onto the past.

In my preceding discussion of science fiction and fantasy, I made many broad generalizations, but the thing that makes “speculative fiction” so great is that there are so many different ideas and such a vast assortment of stories that it’s utterly impossible to fully analyze these genres as a whole. Anything your imagination can dream of is valid. Just about the only things that need to be believable are the characters. With fantasy, the sky is the limit, and with science fiction, the Universe is the limit. I guess that means science fiction has no limit, then.

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