July Contest: Granville Island Toy Company
Filed Under Contests | July 2, 2009
This contest is now closed. Congratulations to Leah Dixon won the grand prize and Katherine Naylor, Tanya Harvey, Ray Ghafouri, Karen Tsang and Gulia who all won $20 gift certificates from the store.
Our July contest is from the Granville Island Toy Company and you could win all the Playmobil your tot can handle!
For over 25 years the Granville Island Toy Company has kept Vancouver kids stocked with toys, games, puzzle, arts & crafts, science experiments and eco-friendly products – all designed to keep your child’s mind growing. They’re known for their fab collection of Playmobil but you’ll also find Lego, Webkinz, Melissa and Doug, Karito Kids, Calico Critters and a great selection of Eco-Friendly toys on their shelves in both their original and Mount Pleasant locations. And this month one lucky reader can win a Playmobil prize pack valued at $100, and there are also five $20 gift certificates to the Granville Island Toy Company up for grabs.
So how can you get your name in the hat for these great prizes? It’s easy – just become a toycompany member at www.toycompany.ca and enter “yoyomama” in the comment field. You can double your chances by letting us know what your child’s favourite educational toy or game is – and why – by commenting on this contest on the yoyomama site.
It’s easy to comment on any of our articles, but you do it on yoyomama.ca not in our daily emails. All you need to do is add your comment at the bottom of the contest after the share and enjoy buttons. Please note: To be eligible for this contest you must use valid email addresses as that is how we’ll contact the winner.
87 Responses to “July Contest: Granville Island Toy Company”
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Let us know what you think or share your great finds with us so we can share them with other Vancouver mothers!
My sons favourite toy currently is a cookie jar and 10 cookie set made by Learning Resources. The baby has fun putting the cookies in the jar and taking them out. The three year old uses the cookies as part of his imagination play and when I have time to sit with him we learn his numerals and their values with little games. It is fun and easy since every cookie has a numeral on the back and the corresponding number of colourful chocolate chips on the front (1-10). A great and inexpensive toy for ages 0-6.
My kidlets really enjoy the toys from Plan Toys! The smooth wooden pieces and colours are attractive to them and both being under the age of 3 so far,a nice handful for them to play with.
The Green Toys tea set is looking next on the list for our daughter! Eco-Friendly toys that last a long time!
Right now my son is really into Sprig toys and although they are not so much educational, they teach him where our recycling could end up. He thinks it’s really cool, that our bin full of junk might turn into a truck one day!
My son loves gears of all types. He loves interlocking them and figuring out how they go together and spin. It’s a great problem solving toy.
My son loves playing with his Lego Star Wars sets, K’Nex and Playmobil. He combines all his sets in the most creative ways!
We love our Green Toys Cookware and Tea Set. Beautiful style and color plus they are made from recycled materials which my children are all about these days! Can’t wait til they put all that pretend gourmet cooking to use in my kitchen as they get older.
My son’s favourite toys at the moment are his organic stuffed animals and wooden rattles. He likes his IDBID Waverly, Lana Dragon and his organic monster made by mom&dad. He also loves his wooden rattles from Hess & Grimms. My son also finds his wooden beaded toy chains from Selecta very interesting – very tactile!
My 13 month old loves reading books (especially lift the flaps), and also likes a shape sorter, Melissa and Doug wooden puzzle, and Clippo pieces. She’s starting to get into pretend play, and the Green Toys tea set is next on our list.
My three kids, ages 6, 4.5 and 2, spend hours, every day, playing with lego duplo! Just like I did with my sisters (though duplo wasn’t quite birthed when we were their ages). The bricks, more than the fancier stuff, though my son would not give up his duplo trucks for anything. What I would love to see are some non-branded Duplo train sets available in North America! (In time for Christmas, maybe?!)
Great contest! One of our family favourites is the playmobil combine that we special ordered from the catalogue. It took almost a year to get it. Apparently they are big in Canada. Well worth the wait!
These days Cadence is a big fan of puzzles and I have to keep finding harder ones for her. She is 2 1/2. It’s really fun to watch her do them and see how things click and how she is starting to use logic to make sense of the picture and of the pieces.
The favourite toy in our home right now is Lego. My 7 year old & 4 year old spend hours building & playing with it. I managed to find some basic Lego bricks but my son has also received quite a few Lego sets as birthday presents. For the longest time I drove myself half crazy trying to keep them all organized and in their own separate containers. Then, one day I just gave up and dumped them all in one big container. My son has never once asked for the instructions so he can replicate the original design and I am always fascinated by the creative objects he and his sister create from the amalgamated Lego collection.
Educational toy … hmmm, I guess the hockey sticks and soccer ball and badminton racquets and lacrosse sticks are teaching him to be a team player. He can’t really play with them on his own very well, so he always asks someone to play with him. He’s developing wonderful social skills, which are far more important in our society than academic skills!
We have most of the Melissa & Doug wooden puzzles and love them. DD learned her numbers, animals, shapes, and alphabets from hours of playing. The sets geared for younger children have big knobs which were perfect for hand-eye co-ordination and reduces frustration when getting the pieces out.
At 19 months, my son is starting to get into the wooden train sets and the fun combinations of trains, tracks and imagination. He also loves stacking up building blocks and trying to knock them down.
Hannah’s current favourite educational toy is her melissa and doug puzzle that makes noise when you put the right piece in the right spot. As she’s only 15 months, she also enjoys putting the puzzle pieces into containers and even chewing on them!
My 11 month old daughter loves to play with her shape sorter. It teaches her how things fit together although she gets frustrated when the circle won’t go in the square hole. I guess she’ll learn soon.
My boys (4 & 6) are VERY into Lego and K’Nex building. The 4 year old is still very into playmobil too. Their little sister, who is only 6 months old is basically obsessed with trying to get ahold of any of the above tiny little pieces! :)
A bucket or container! My girls love to explore the outdoors and are fascinated with plants, bugs, rocks,really everything and collect stuff they come across in our yard or our travels. Its like science class. Lots of discussion and I think appreciation of nature.Its always interesting to see what becomes of their treasures.
My 2-1/2 year old loves building, both with Duplo/Mega Bloks and with wooden Plan Toys blocks. She loves to see how high she can build a tower, and then to crash one of her cars or helicopters into it and see it collapse. She also builds roads for the cars, and likes the bumpy textures of the Duplo for “speed bumps.”
Bought the SweetPea3 player this Jan and my 5 year old brings it with her everywhere. Love the adult controlled volume control. When en route, I love hearing her little voice singing away to her favorite songs.
my little girl of 2.5 years loves the Green Toys Tea Set. She’s constantly having tea parties with friends and her stuffed toys.
We are really enjoying our most recent purchase, the magnetic shapes game (Mighty Minds) which is an especially great activity for road trips. It has varying levels of complexity, so is a activity our 4 year old can engage in by himself or with us.
My 1 and 1/2 year old son loves books, they are probably his fav. educational toy, but he learns lots from just playing with a bouncy ball and a basket.
For educational toys, my nearly 3 year old daughter loves her books and puzzles!
I have to agree with some of the other parents — for educational toys, books are definitely at the top of the list for my 3 year old. She’s been fascinated by books since a very early age, and always has lots of questions about the stories and pictures.
She also likes plants and flowers, and loved the “nature bracelet” idea which I think came from an earlier Yoyomama posting (a bracelet of masking tape on which you stick leaves and flowers you find while out on a walk).
My 3-yr-old daughter also loves the Green Toys Tea Set, and has developed some very precise pouring skills from playing with it every day!
Our 4 year old son plays with almost any kind of toy including improvised accessories like sticks for pirate swords and toilet paper tubes for spyglasses. When we need a more focused quiet type of play, we direct him to puzzles, lego and playmobil. He loves to create worlds and people them with all kinds of characters. He is also fascinated by the catalogs. He can look at the playmobil catalog for an hour!
Our 3 yr old son loves automoblox cars – taking them complety apart, exhanging parts and rebuilding, making limos and short vehicles, interchanging the people, learning shapes and colours and dexterity. We think it is truly a fantastic toy – and our 7 month old nephew also loves them too.
Our 15-month-old loves flipping through his books, which are helping him to make connections between words and objects. Now he points to a picture on a page (e.g., a tree) and then points to the same kind of object outside and says, “tree!”
We love Melissa & Doug products because they have an old fashioned feel to them…our favorite right now is the picnic basket. Looks like Granville Island Toy Company will be carrying their products.
We love Melissa and Doug puzzles!
My five year old and 2 year old both love Lego. They also both love blank sketchbooks and pencil crayons to draw and write. But books are the hands-down, all-time favourite!
Hi there…my 6 month old daughter absolutely loves her Sophie the Giraffe! As she is teething right now, Sophie provides her with much needed relief!!
Thanks for hosting this contest yoyomamma! Love your newsletters…keep up the good work!
My three-and-a-half year old likes to play with felt stories from 3H Craftworks Society on West 4th. After I read her story (50 times!) she’ll tell it to herself with the felt pieces. It was a riot listening in the other day when she had the wolf huff-puff-blowing down the brick house.
My 20 moth old son Jackson is very into blocks right now. He received them as a gift in a pull cart so he hauls them around all over the house, then stacks them as high as he can before sneakily knocking them over!! They’re also great because they have letters and numbers on them so we have fun spelling his name with them.
I love the Granville Island Toy Co.!!!!!
My eldest absolutely loves playmobil. At least once a month we make a big deal of heading down to The Granville Island Toy Company so she can pick out another mini set. We then we spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around together and even take a little scoot around the harbour on the ferry.
We love Plan Toys because they are eco-friendly and they don’t require batteries. Yah!
My 21 month old son is a huge train fan and spends ages putting together tracks and crafting elaborate tunnels out of all kinds of household items. Books and puzzles are his favourite educational toys and he adores Playmobile, WOW Toys, megablocks and Plan Toys.
Puzzles, puzzles, puzzles! “Melissa and Doug” makes some great ones!
I am starting a plan toy collection for my daughter- also we collect Schleg (spelling??) pirates, knights and fairies. We don’t have alot of toys but the ones we have are loved and used! Our #1 toy in the summer is a big red shovel- we own a family set – long handles big scoopers – not a dollar store cheapy- they last a long time if you spend $15!
My little dude loves imaginative play with his Plan Toys Parking Garage, which he calls his ‘Big Happy’ because it was a ‘big’ happy birthday gift. He also loves puzzles!
We are proud owners of three Granville Island Toy Company red cloth bags for our big birthday and Christmas blowout buys, but I also love the stores for carrying small wee little doodads that make for a really great rainy day walk for a small treat. I like how you can find a great range of prices and toys for playmate birthday gifts as well as ‘long-term investment’ toys like Lego sets.
I also fell in love with the Calico Critters I found there in Granville Island and later at the Main St location.
I collect them whenever I can…uh…for my daughter, of course,…and we got a small, handmade, antique dollhouse for my…uh, I mean HER, collection to live in,…and I bought the origami paper set to make wallpaper (although she’s too young to glue it on, I HAVE to do it for her, you see) and I even let her play with it if she’s really careful, and I share nicely and everything…
I’ve said too much.
And daddy wants the bubonic plague stuffy for his birthday. (it’s gonna happen)
:)
My son loves his old-school Fisher Price shape sorter. For months he has plunked the circle shapes through thr top over and over and over again, but has recently figured out how to ‘sort’ the other shapes too!
We bought our very first collection of Calico Critters nursery house & doll sets @ the Main St location for our dd’s Christmas present last yr. We also bought her the add-ons and said it’s from her baby sister who was also born in Dec :) It’s her fav ever since and she called it her “bunny house”. She likes to pretend to be “mommy” after the arrival of our dd so she is also into her wooden kitchen set and wooden food and accessories fr. plan toys, Melissa & Doug, and also some interesting ones we found while traveling in Europe just a few months ago. Oh and she is also into Lego, my husband’s fav :)
My son is really into his wooden musical instruments/block toys, it is good hand eye coordination and teaches him cause and effect.He is learning how to hold a variety of widths and textures and what happens when you combine things. We would love some new Plan toys!
My 16 months old loves a Melissa and Doug puzzle (though she doesn’t use it to fit the pieces back into their places, but rather puts the animal pieces “to live” in the barn piece :0)).
She’s also a big fan of toddler books, especially the ones where you lift flaps and the ones that have different textures in them.
Occasionally I let her get into the shelf where I keep my art books, and she invariably chooses Picasso to look at – I’m always surprised by such a defined taste at such a young age!
My son loves his Leapfrog Leappad. He is almost five and has just about mastered the books/cartridges that we have. For his fifth birthday he will be receiving the Leapfrog Leapster 2.
Wooden alphabet/number blocks!
These contests are so exciting! It is so cool to see that the Granville Island toy company is still around as I used to get toys from there when I was a kid – I guess that marks ALOT of time gone by.
My 12 months old daughter favorite toy is a black rubber rat :-)
I am a Discovery Toys rep, so my kids get to check out all the new toys as they come out. My 4 year old son’s favourite is the Motor Works set – he never seems to get tired to taking the vehicles apart and putting them back together. Great fine motor skills toy for boys. My 21 month old daughter’s favourites are the Giant Peg Board and the My Busy Day activity blocks. She really enjoys stacking them up, talking about all the things she recognizes in the pictures, etc.
Definitely Playmobil and Lego. My kids love the Playmobil and combine various sets to create imaginative adventures. I love hearing my 5- and 3-year old acting out an invented scene or re-creating a story from their own lives.
My 2 year LOVES the Melisa & Doug puzzles but especially the one with all the keys and locks. It’s amazing for fine motor skills but still offers colors/animals/numbers as you open. I may regret it as he can now open any lock or hinged door-but he doesn’t tire of it.
My 15 month old daughter loves everything from Plan Toys. Her favourite right now is the bamboo drum set. She will sit on the floor and play with the drum set all day if we let her, she loves that the drums bounce back, and she loves loves loves the sound of the symbols, now she will pick up anything that resembles a two sticks and pretend that she’s playing the drums =)
My 6 month-old absolutely loves the Haba clutching toys. Bright and colorful, made of wood and water-based paint. I love that they are not plastic!!
Right now we love anything to do with art, painting, molding, stamping, beading, drawing, right now our favourite and our best is the Melissa & Doug stamping set. they are high quality wooden handled stamps and the coloured pencils included allow my daughter to add her own details.
My son’s fav toy seems to change hourly. But he consistently loves his books.
Currently nesting cups are a huge hit, as is anything with a handle that makes a banging sound on the ground. Peekaboo is hands down the current favourite game!
My daughter’s favorite toy right now is her magnetic fishing game. We are learning how to take turns with the little fishing rod and she likes to name all the aquatic creatures that she catches.
My two-years-old’s favorite toy is his duplo Lego set, he started just by asking us to build thinks for him , then he started putting just random pieces toghether and now he likes to put pieces toghether and, although it looks like no shape in paricular, he likes to pretend is a lawn mower, weed eather, vacoum cleaner, anything!
For our daughters 3rd Birthday we bought her a Melissa & Doug Sorting Clock. It’s a bright clock with different shaped blocks where the numbers are, and on each shape is a number. Our older daughter helped our youngest take the blocks out and put them back again. In only 2 days my 3 year old was showing me she could put all the blocks back correctly! I was very surprised! It’s great b/c they learn about shapes, numbers and the arrangements of numbers around a clock.
My baby loves all her stuff toys she kisses them and talks to them
My daughter loves books, spends ages looking at them and is always happy to have them read to her. She particularly loves when we do funny voices. My husnad is great at that
Right now she loves figuring things out, putting taps on and off bottles, figure our mechanisms, how different things work, try to put them apart and back together, can spend ages doing that
My little girl is a water enthusiast, anything doing with water, whetehr it is getting a wet cloth and clean the windows, or play with her water and sand table or play in her pool or having a splas in the bath tub, she could be a fish!
My two-year-old daughter plays with her Playmobil figurines every day – her “plastic friends”, we call them. She uses them to act out whatever’s on her mind at the moment. I love overhearing what’s going on in her little head!
Both my son & daughter love to play with Lego K’Nex and Playmobil. Great for the rainy summer afternoons inside.
I love the new Egyptian Playmobil sets! But will my daughter? Of course!
Lego, lego, lego! You can never have enough!
We love plan toys! We have the dollhouse and the garden and the playground sets and my girls spend hours playing with them. But they are also into books, dressup, art, crafts, games, pretend games, blocks, puzzles…..
My son loves to play with his new Playmobil car repair set, Lego and anything related to space – including the cool rockets from Granville Island Toy Company where you jump on the pump and watch the rocket fly! A hit with the neighbourhood kids!
My 2 year old daughter’s favourite educational toys would have to be books. She’s always loved books and I find she learns a lot from reading and searching for things on the pages. She also loves to colour! She’ll spend hours with some markers or crayons and a blank sketchpad.
My 5 year old son plays with anything he can build. He got for his 4th birthday this little box of playmobile and since then we bought him 4 more. He can’t stop playing and building. His imagination comes to life.
My son is obsessed with Playmobil. He loves the crocodile habitat and the dolphin pool. He’s hoping for the penguin set next!
Playmobil is my daughter’s favorite at this time. She loves bringing out the Take Along doll house that she received as a Christmas gift last year, which is where she keeps all her playmobils on hand. I can’t believe how creative she can be and the funny stories that she puts together. It is fun to watch and be a part of.
Lego – My sons (3 and 11) can play together and learn how different buildings are more stable. Also the younger one learns to fit things together by watching his brother.
My almost 3 year old LOVES his kid k’nex. He plays with it every day and is getting pretty great at putting them together and using them in imaginary play. We’re looking to get him a huge set for his birthday.
My 2 year old daughter’s favorite thing to do is help her mommy. She loves to clean up by using the broom and dust pan, or the swiffer, or “help” me do the dishes by playing with the bubbles in the sink. Every time I do the dishes she gets a chair and pushes it to the sink, say’s “excuse me” and then gets up and starts playing.
One of my son’s favourite educational games at the moment is “tea time”. He has a little tea set from Granville Island Toy Co. and he loves pouring, stirring, sipping and sharing his tea with friends and family. We think this a great game for his social and fine motor development-he is becoming more aware of taking turns and being gentle with cups and saucers.
My baby Ben is 10 months and loves egg shakers and hand held shakers. He bounces and shakes up a storm1
Our 21 month old loves the WOW firetruck. He can spend a lot of time moving the men around to the dirrerent compartments. Another big favorite is any viking toy, but especially the airplane or helicopters since he can relate that to the sounds of aircraft in the sky. Thanks for the contest.
My son Marcus’ fave toy from the Toy Co has been Wedgits. Hours and hours of fun and every now and then hidden and brought back out for more fun. It has been a toy that has really grown with him.
My twins are almost 20 months old – currently their favorite toy is Mr Potato Head. Not sure how educational he is but he sure has been around a long time! I played with him when I was a kid. They rarely get the pieces in the right spot(other than the hat, they know where that goes!) but trying to get those parts in the small holes must be developing their motor skills!
My 3 year old goes nuts about old fashioned jigsaw puzzles, more so if they have princesses and pink in them.
My just-turned-two-year-old is getting more and more into dressing up so we have a box full of old clothes, necklaces, bags etc in her room (her pink fluffy high heels that I bought on a girly whim from the Kids Market are the envy of our gay neighbours).
She also loves playing with her baby doll – it goes everywhere and she is constantly wiping it with baby wipes, singing to it, feeding it and so on as I suppose she observes us doing to her. It’s when she starts putting money away for its college education that I’ll know she’s going too far with the ‘pretend mummy’ thing.