BEST SELLERS

No need to wait 70 million years anymore. Satisfy your impatient paleontologists with this DIY fossil-making kit. Comes with (2) bags of air-dry clay, (7) acrylic paint colors, a brush and (3) dinosaur figures. Never too early, or late, to learn about fossils.

Shoot one of these little plastic arrow-helicopter-rotor gismos straight up with the included rubber band launcher and watch it soar as far as 300 feet! A fun outdoor toy that grows in sophistication as you learn how to adjust the arrowcopter for wind conditions and flight patterns: distance, return, circular descent etc. Our "each" contains a package of two (2). Recommended for kids over the age of 9.

Time was, these service bells were on every teacher's desk and the front desk of every hotel in the world. They're still a classically beautiful design, and they'll still bring folks running when you tap the little plunger on top. The shiny matte chrome bell sits on an enameled steel base and the whole thing is 3-1/8" dia x 2-1/4" tall.

The magic putty with dyspepsia is back. OK, it's fart goop, but you still wouldn't want to go to middle school without it. You'll get about 2-1/4 oz (in a color we'll pick) inside a little round plastic container that's about 2-1/2" tall x 1-1/2" dia--a little bigger than an old film canister, or roughly the size of a shot glass. Put in a thumb; pull out a rude noise.

There's nothing better for long, lonely days than watching critters in the back yard, and this National Wildlife Federation® paperback, Attracting Birds, Butterflies, and Other Backyard Wildlife, shows you how to expand your local menagerie beyond squirrels and sparrows. Includes (17) wildlife-friendly projects for the entire family in (168) pages with more (200) color photographs. Contains instructions on getting your yard or garden certified as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat, too. Be the first on your block to be able to say that at a cocktail party.

If you're devoted to explosions, and who isn't, you'll love the new expanded 2nd edition of William Gurstelle's Backyard Ballistics, now 25% longer, with 25% more ka-boomery. Still the go-to reference work for building rockets, cannons (carbide and potato), flingers, fire kites, electromagnetic pipe guns, tennis ball mortars, cleaner-bag balloons, ballistic pendula and petards. You simply can't have more fun with common household materials. The soft-cover, 210pp compendium includes detailed and illustrated instructions, parts lists and sensible ways not to be hoist on your own petard. Be careful out there.

Poker gets art-directed. Our each is a stack of (100) stackable poker chips, none of them red, green or yellow. You’ll get (25) each in maroon and midnight blue, plus (50) in a nice pale gray. Makes you want to dress a little better on game night.

Hold the bottom onion-shaped bulb of this 4" glass toy in your hand and watch the liquid (green, red, blue or purple, we'll pick) magically bubble up into the top chamber and keep on bubbling like the dickens, as your grandmother used to say. The magic is ethyl alcohol and physics. WARNING! The glass if fragile and the liquid is nasty. If you drop the thing in the kitchen it will eat the finish off the tile and permanently stain the floor, so don't let the kids handle this item unsupervised.

A tiny touch of whimsy from your local scientific and surplus monger. You get a trio of 1-3/4" dia x approx 2-5/8" tall plastic tops in assorted colors, with the American Science & Surplus logo on the disc. The tops of the tops have a vaguely Constantinopolitan shape, and are a different color from the bottom. Just one more dazzling detail from Jarvis.

A real desktop mesmerizer. This 7"x 5" moving sand sculpture creates endless sand-dune vistas, and can be so easily flipped to start over that you need never go back to actually working. The sand is so fine it's nearly liquid, and comes in varying shades, plus a little glitter. Black base and frame. We'll pick sand in shades of orange, purple, green or red for you.

Our robotic kingii dragon (Chlamydosaurus kingii, or frilled-neck lizard) is better than a puppy because you don't have clean up after it and it won't chew the furniture. This STEM education kit has (2) motors and digital control via IR sensors to activate LED eyes, motorized mouth and pop-out neck frill, plus "Escape" and "Chase" modes, which make it retreat and follow you using IR sensors, respectively. You'll need (4) "AAA" batteries and some patience, as this kit is delightfully challenging. Finished dragon will be 13-1/2" long x 8-1/4" x 5". For ages 10+.

Well, if you had a crystal ball, you'd be able to see that there's a crystal ball in your future, and you'd know not to pass up this very, very nice glass gazing ball. It's 4-1/4" dia (and heavy) and comes with a footed dark-wood stand that spins smoothly. The stand is just over 3" dia. Together, the ball and stand are 6-1/4" tall. Comes in a presentation and storage box. The perfect accessory for your next fortune-telling gig.

We don't know the folks at TSA, but we're hoping they won't let you on the plane with this remote-controlled rattler, for everyone's sake. Measures approx 16" long with (22) segments and creeps along quite quickly when you push the forward, left or right buttons on the snake-eggish infrared remote. Remote runs on (3) button-cell batteries, included, and the snake is rechargeable via the included USB charge cord. Range is about 20 feet. We'll pick a snake in serpauthentic speckled gray, speckled white, or green or orange, all with a nice retractable tongue. Ages 8+.

Just like our famous cow popper, but this guy is a 5-1/4” tall rubber axolotl with a mouth big enough to take a 1-1/8” dia foam ball and spit it 20 feet when you squeeze it, as you will want to do. And if you’re axolotl-ignorant, they’re neotenic salamanders, the world’s cutest amphibians, and they also answer to “Mexican walking fish.” Ours come with (6) foam balls for your axolotl-squeezing convenience. For ages 4+.

We just learned that. You’d think we’d have known. Now we do. They’re sort of like round dreidels, with a hollowed-out middle around the stem, which causes them to turn themselves upside down while they’re spinning. Great lesson in center-of-mass instruction for physics teachers. Includes an explanatory booklet with activities and discussion topics. You’ll get (3) wooden tops at 7/8”, 1-1/4” and 1-1/2” dia.

A gallimaufry of gags, the prankster's pantheon. Our seven-day selection of sophomoric stupidity includes a joy buzzer, a fake ketchup spill that is perfect for a laptop or tablet, wrapped candy thats more bug than treat, a pack of gum with a mousetrap inside, a nice fake nail to put through a finger, a fly-in-the-ice cube, and the American classic whoopee cushion. Add some rubber vomit and you've got enough gifts to get through Channukah.

Our seriously oversized #2 pencil is perfect for someone taking really important notes, or anyone who's tired of misplacing pencils. Also good for that big test. Measures 14" long x a 1-1/8" octagon, with a working eraser. Really thick graphite runs about 2" into the pencil, which will be plenty since we couldn't find a pencil sharpener to fit it anyway.

Old MacDonald had a very odd farm. And you can too, with this farmload of (10) baby animals, including a calf, rabbit, piglet, baby chick, duckling, lamb, kid (that's a baby goat, kids), kitten and beagle puppy. All are plastic and approx 1-1/2” long x 1” to 1-1/2” tall, which makes for a scale that's a tad whimsical, with the little chick standing taller than the piglet and the rabbit appearing to outweigh the lamb by a factor of five or six. They're all as cute as the dickens, though.