For many today the idea of traditional toys seems obsolete – something from the “good old days” but this simply isn’t true. There are still plenty of traditional toys out there – old-fashioned wooden blocks, wooden pull toys, rag dolls, and the like. You just have to know where to find them – or how to make them if you are feeling adventurous! Making homemade toys can be a lot of fun, if you’re up for it! A homemade wooden toy will last a lifetime and can be passed on by your own children. Such items will be cherished far more than throw away plastic alternatives.Traditional toy making refers to hand-made wooden toys, sewn and soft toys, and even a few recycled items. Remember, babies and toddlers in particular don’t need fancy or expensive toys with flashing lights and lots of sounds to have fun. (As you will know if you have ever seen your two-year-old most of the morning playing in and around a cardboard box or the laundry basket!If you go down the route of making toys yourself it will open you up to the world of crafts, which you can eventually share with your children as they get older. Soon, you won’t be making toys for them, but with them! How exciting is that? Sewing projects and woodworking are the two leaders when it comes to traditional toy making. No matter what your skill or talent, there’s something you can make. Look online. There is a wealth of free tutorials, patterns, and instructions. So, go on have a go at it, you’ll be surprised how satisfying it is!When you make old-fashioned toys with a traditional feel for your kids, you’re not just taking a walk down memory lane. Some of these items can actually benefit your kids. Traditional toys, much more so than modern variants, actually help your kids expand their minds and imagination. Plain old sturdy toys are the best educational toys for kids in the long run. They inspire creativity and exploration. With modern toys, there’s often nothing to really think about and most of the time kids are just emulating what they’ve seen on TV.A toy box filled with traditional toys – ones that you’ve made or purchased – invoke your child’s ability to create, innovate, and invent. Traditional toys are passively educational – your child’s imagination will grow and expand without them even realising it! Old-fashioned wooden toys like building blocks, puzzles, and pull-toys encourage lateral thinking, problem-solving skills, and even fine motor skills. Ironically traditional toys are actually often a lot safer than modern ones. There are less choking hazards, less worry about lead-based paints, no leaking batteries or electrical parts, and are less likely to break when chewed on.Ultimately, these types of toys endure the test of time. Though many parents went through a stage of eliminating them from their children’s lives, traditional toys are definitely back for 2012! Sales are rising and the interest in parents making their own toys has soared too.Traditional wooden toys can last generations and stay when modern toy trends come and go. So, if you haven’t already, set aside some time to try and make something, or find a quality shop that specialises in wooden and educational toys, like we do at Little Sardines.

My associates in the financial service industry acknowledge that college graduates from United States universities are generally unprepared for entry-level professional positions. They have particularly noticed a drop in basic skills. Students who were once hired from accredited second-tier universities can no longer be relied upon to meet even minimal standards in many professional entry-level positions. (Note: I refer to top-tier as only one to two dozen colleges across the nation. These are Ivies and several select colleges such as MIT and Johns Hopkins.)A business executive may hire a graduate from what he believes is a top-performing business school that also boasts a nationally ranked football team into a marketing or customer service assignment. (Colleges that sport nationally ranked teams are characteristic of second-tier schools.) He must spend valuable time coaching and monitoring the new employee as the graduate lacks the most basic core skills. But executives today just do not have the time to do this in a time-stressed high-pressured corporate environment.Managers are shocked by poor writing and language skills of recent graduates.The situation is far worse than you might imagine. The results of my interviews with business people in many corporations conclude that students cannot function effectively in their chosen fields of study. Also, they often are severely deficient in written language and reasoning skills required to make incisive judgments and decisions. The standards have sunk so low that many students from second-tier universities cannot write a paragraph without making a major spelling or grammatical mistake.Yet the universities continue to accept the students in far greater numbers than in past decades, and offer little effective remedial help for students in need. And what is most distressing is that, as a result of grade inflation, almost every student can graduate from an accredited college today while receiving little or no help from their universities to rectify severe learning problems.Professors have little experience in their field and have no incentive to teach effectively.Full-time professors have their PhD but little real-life experience in their field of study. Consequently, at the end of four years, students have little acquired knowledge and cannot think critically in their chosen career field. Professors, especially those who have tenure and are almost impossible to relieve, show little concern with their own job performance and have relatively little incentive to instruct to high standards.It’s a fact!You don’t have to take my word alone for any of this. In one of the few honest and broad-based surveys of businesses conducted by an academic association, the Association of American Colleges and Universities in January of 2007 disclosed that two-thirds of the employers surveyed said that college graduates lack the skills to succeed in today’s economic environment. In fact, more than 70 percent said colleges just weren’t doing the job of emphasizing critical and analytical reasoning as well as creativity and innovation. These are just the things that colleges hang their hats on when trumpeting the value of a college education. Think of how really bad this is.If the education is so bad, who can we hire?So what can an executive do? She will hire only from top-tier schools that recruit their incoming freshmen from the very top of their high school classes. If her field is highly specialized, she may even go outside the country and recruit students from Asia, India or Argentina (hotbeds of Information Technology) where professors have experience in their fields. The students from these schools will have the knowledge, the tenacity, and, hopefully, the appetite to get the job done professionally.With few job prospects, most graduates are coming out of college with nothing to show for their four years. They don’t even receive an education.