I thought that since Christmas was coming up in a number of

countries around the world that it might be a good time to talk

a little bit about kids' toys. This will be a lesson about

toys that I had as a kid. Toys that are modern and current. Um

some toys that are very old fashioned. Um but I think it

will be a fun lesson. Uh it's fun to learn all of the names

for different toys in English. I think most of these toys will

be familiar to you. I think you'll have the same toys in

your country. Um I do have to say one thing though. The

slides for this lesson are very colourful. I think kids toys

are often painted or the colours are usually very

vibrant and bright. So welcome once again to this very

colourful lesson about kids toys. So blocks probably one of

the first toys that every child has is a set of blocks.

Sometimes the blocks have the letters of the elf bit on the

side. Sometimes they're just plain blocks like this. And

they're the first toy you can play with where you can hold

them. You can stack them. Uh you can roll them. You can

throw them. Just don't throw them too hard. But blocks are a

very very common toy for a very very young child. Often the

block is made out of wood. So we would call them wooden

blocks. When a toy is made out of wood we use the word wooden

to describe it. So some kids have plastic blocks. Some of

them have wooden blocks. One of the first Toys that you have as

a child. And then another very common toy is a toy called

Lego. I put this as the second slide because this was my

favourite toy when I was a kid. When I was a kid I can't

remember when I got my first Lego set. But I do remember

quite often playing with Lego. Lego are a collection of bricks

that click together and then they stick together so you can

build things out of them. You can build houses. You can build

little cars because you can get wheels for them. Uh Lego is

just a very very fun toy. In fact I think my mom still has

my box of Lego from when I was a kid. I should go pick that up

because maybe I should reminisce and build something.

We also have what are called action figures. An action

figure is a small figurine that's made similar to look

like something someone in a movie or cartoon. So here you

see the Incredible Hulk. This is an action figure of the

Incredible Hulk. I didn't have a lot of action figures when I

was a kid. Um I did have Toys Soldiers when I was a kid. Um

but some people had action figures from GI Joe when I was

a kid and I didn't have one. I don't know if you know what GI

Joe is. Uh Brent from Speak English with this guy would

know what that is. But yes an action figure. So in this

current modern era you could have an action figure from the

Marvel movies. You could have an action figure of Iron Man or

Captain America if that was something you enjoyed watching.

A puzzle. This is what I would call a classic toy. A puzzle is

simply a picture that's cut into pieces and you need to

figure out how to put it back together. When I was a kid I

had a lot of puzzles. Now when you have puzzles as a kid they

have less pieces. Then a puzzle would have for an adult. My mom

loves to do puzzles but they have a thousand or 2000 pieces.

When I was a kid I had puzzles like this. This puzzle has

let's see here. I think about 3-five pieces if I'm counting

That would be a normal puzzle for a small child. I loved

doing puzzles as a kid. They were a lot of fun. This I would

say is one of the most common kinds of kids toy. And this is

a stuffed animal. We also in our house sometimes just call

them stuffies. But a stuffed animal is a soft toy. This is a

teddy bear. A very common type of stuffed animal. I had a

small dog as a stuffed animal as a child. And when I got

older my sister and I started to fight. Because we both

thought the stuffed animal belonged to us. But I was

pretty sure it belonged to me. It was a small red white dog.

Um and still to this day I believe that the stuffed animal

that I had as a kid was mine. But my sister still thinks it

was hers. Anyways once again a stuffed animal is a very soft

toy. Um almost has the same stuffing as a pillow. Um and a

teddy bear is one of the most common kinds. And then we have

of course all kinds of toy cars toy vehicles. When I was a

child I had toy tractors. But I think most kids will have a toy

car or toy truck. Um sometimes they're big. Sometimes they're

small. I'll talk about smaller ones in just a moment. Uh but

definitely when I was a kid I did have toy cars. But because

we lived on a farm I had toy tractors. As well. So just a

car but made really small for a kid or a tractor or truck but

made really small for a child to play with. And we had a

specific kind of toy car and toy truck when I was a kid. We

would call them dinky cars, Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars. So

here you can see them. They were about this big. They were

very tiny. I had a small collection of Hot Wheels cars

when I was a kid. By the way we have different names because I

think Hot Wheels and Matchbox are the name of the company.

And I'm not sure about Dinky Car. I think it's an older way

to talk about it. Um to talk about tiny little cars. They're

all the same scale. I'm not sure what the scale is. But

they were all about this big. They were a lot of fun to play

with. And you could get a track to drive them down and you

could hook the track up to a table and drive let your cars

drive down the track. That was a lot of fun. When I was a bit

older as a child I had a yo-yo. Again this is a bit of a

mixture of this lesson is a mixture of older types of toys

and newer types of toys. We would say the yo-yo has stood

the test of time. The yoyo is still a very common gift today.

Um we have a couple yo-yos in our house. I do like doing a

yo-yo. I should make a video someday of me yo-yoing. I think

that's the word for it. But the yo-yo is a spinning top with a

string that you can throw down and then pull back up again.

It's a lot of fun. I really enjoyed I actually learned how

to do the yo-yo when I was in university. Not when I was a

child. When I was a child I had one but I didn't really know

how to use it. This is a toy that I never had. This is what

we would call an old fashioned toy. This is a toy that people

had many many years ago before my time. The were things called

rocking horses. They were usually made out of wood. So it

was a small horse with rockers on the bottom. So if you sat on

it as a kid you could rock back and forth. Um I think these

were pretty common like in the 50s and sixties. I'm not sure.

I think my mom had a rocking horse when she was a kid. But I

did not have a rocking horse. But certainly you'll if you

watch an old TV or an old movie and if there's children in it

they might have a rocking horse. Um one of the other toys

you get very early on in life is called a rattle. So this is

anything that you shake that makes noise. This is a very

common toy for babies. When a baby is able to sit up and hold

things one of the first things you might give the baby is a

rattle. And that's why we sometimes call it a baby

rattle. We actually just say baby rattle. Um but a baby

rattle is something a child can hold and shake that makes a

little bit of noise. I don't have one in front of me but I

should have brought one. I think we have one in the house

somewhere. Probably another very very common type of toy is

just a doll. This is a common toy. It's usually just a small

person. Um sometimes like the far doll they have they're kind

of soft. Sometimes like this closer doll which is called a

Barbie doll. So the girl in the blue dress right beside me is

called a Barbie doll. A very common type of doll. Um usually

kids when they have dolls they will play house. When you play

house it means that you play with your dolls as if they're

people and maybe the doll gets in her doll car and goes and

get some groceries or the doll goes to her doll work or

something like that. But dolls are certainly a very very

common toy. If I was to say top five I think dolls are in the

top five as type of toy that kids play with. Um educational

toys. So I didn't have toys like this when I was a child.

But there are toys that are educational toys. This is a toy

that it looks like the child had to build it. It looks like

it has some electronics on it. It looks like they needed to

attach the wheels and they needed to hook up wires and

they probably needed to put a battery in it. And I'm sure it

drives around. So as they built this toy and as they play with

this toy they're also learning something. So we would call it

an educational toy. Um when I was a kid my brother had a a

think he had a science lab or little electronics lab where he

could learn how to make and program different things. It

was really really cool. Um he enjoyed building stuff with it.

A Frisbee. So a Frisbee is a disc that you can throw and

when you throw it it flies really nicely. Um it kind of

glides through the air. Uh you can throw a frisbee back and

forth to another person. When I was a kid I did have a frisbee.

Frisbees are super fun. When I was in university I played a

little bit of frisbee golf. So frisbee golf is where you play

golf but you use frisbees instead. And I think there's

something called Ultimate Football where you play

football American style football but you use a frisbee

instead. But at its simplest level it's fun to have a

Frisbee just to throw back and forth. It's fun to play frisbee

with a friend. Do you want to go play Frisbee? Okay let's go

play Frisbee. And you throw it back and forth. When I was a

kid a relative visited from Holland and he brought gifts

for all of us. And he gave me a kite. I had never had a kite

before. A kite is a small flying toy with a string. A

long string on it. And on a windy day you can go and fly

your kite. So the wind catches the kite which goes up in the

sky and then you hold the string and the kite flies up in

the air. Um it was a lot of fun. It was a big kite with a

lion on it. Um and I'm not sure the exact details but I had it

for I think almost a whole summer and then eventually it

did break. It broke. But I did enjoy flying my kite. So

another common type of toy that a lot of kids have is a kite.

We also had when I was a kid we always had water guns. So water

guns shoot water. When it's hot in the summer it is very fun to

have water guns. It's fun to have water gun fights. So you

fill your gun with water. And then you go and squirt people.

They're also sometimes called squirt guns. So water gun

squirt gun. A very fun toy to have on a hot day. But not good

to use the squirt gun to squirt water on your parents or

adults. Adults don't like being adults don't like it when

little kids run around with water guns and shoot them with

water. We also as kids sometimes just had toy guns.

Toy guns are sometimes futuristic. It might look like

a laser gun. Sometimes it just looks kind of like a real gun

but sometimes you would play different games. Uh you would

play cops and robbers. And so cops and rob is when some kids

pretend they're the robbers and other kids try to catch them.

But definitely we do have different types of toys. Some

are a little strange. It is a little strange to me that you

would make a toy out of something as destructive as a

gun but we do have them. And then there's something called a

Nerf gun. So I'm not sure if you've ever had a Nerf gun. It

shoots a very soft foam projectile. Um and we actually

own this very nerf gun. It is kind of fun because it has a

suction cup on the end. So the projectile or bullet will stick

to the wall when you fire it. So Nerf gun. Very fun to play

with. Um if you have a target on the wall, it's fun to shoot

the Nerf gun at the target. So as I mentioned before we

sometimes have wooden toys. It could be wooden blocks. It

could be a wooden train set. Wooden train sets are actually