Santa Bruce

Kaitlyn's American Girl Doll! (Photo credit: Elizabeth/Table4Five)

Get into reading this summer with the American Girl reading program for young ladies between the ages of 8 and 12.  Visit their site at americangirl.com/reading to download bookmarks, learning guides and quizzes to see how much you know about American Girl historical characters. You can also find out about free in-store events that will be offered all summer long.

Lego has teamed with Disney on products such as Star Wars but now they have included Princesses for the young ladies. The Lego Duplo brand of products are designed for children 5 and under with a design that allows smaller hands to easily work with the sets.  Disney and Lego have come out with a Disney Princess line of products that include Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty.  Cinderella includes Prince Charming as well as their castle which younger children will enjoy building for them to live happily every after.

The Hunger Games (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Mattel has announced a new Barbie to tag into the very popular The Hunger Games book series and movie.  She is very different without the traditional makeup look, but with braided hair, hooded jacket and military style pants, along with bow and arrows.  Pre-orders for Katniss are available on Amazon.com.

The classic red-and-white Etch A Sketch model (Photo credit: Wikipedia)All it took was a comment by an aide of Mitt Romney and the stock went from $4/share to move to at $12.50/share on Thursday.  If politicians continue to use toys as metaphors this might be the year to invest in toy companies.

Image via WikipediaIt was a very good year for the LEGO Group with the high growth rate of 2010 continued for another year.  Profit for the year increased from $884 million to $1.057 billion dollars in 2011 on sales that were up 17% over the previous year.  Licensed products such as Star War(TM) and Harry Potter(TM) accounted for sales well above expectation.  Classic lines of LEGO products also rose in 2011.  In looking forward to 2012, LEGO expects continued growth in their product line.

Image via Wikipedia

In comparing store sales this year to last year Toys R Us reported and increase of 1.2%.  The downside is that they opened fewer pop-up-stores during Christmas so overall sales in the US fell 1.2%.  Internationally, sales improved by 5.1% primarily because of overseas acquisitions.