If it’s Christmas, it must be Funderland!
Funderland is an inseparable part of Christmas for plenty of Dubliners, and this year things will be the no different with the RDS extravaganza open from December 14 to January 17.
The Funderland Indoor Pavilion, housing Europe’s largest indoor theme park, opens from 2-9pm on weekdays and from 12pm to 10pm on weekends and during the holidays. It’s packed with attractions from Germany including the Power Wave, Break Dance, and the ‘Around the World’ Star Flyer, as well as old favourites such as the Funderland Loop, Ireland’s only looping rollercoaster.
Other highlights include iSkate-on-Ice, Ireland’s only outdoor skating rink – 1,000sqm in size, with a kiddie rink for young children, open from 10am most days – and a Christmas market where stallholders in wooden chalets sell everything from snacks and drinks to traditional craftwork.
Spare the toys: Children play better with fewer toys, a new study has suggested.
Researchers at the University of Toledo, Ohio, gave 36 toddlers either four or 16 toys and observed that children with only a small number of toys would play for longer periods and with more creativity than children with large numbers of toys.
“When there were 16, they’d just bounce from toy to toy, and they were sort of superficial in the way they explored it and then move on to the next,” said Dr Alexia Metz, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the university.
“We decided to do the study because we have some reservations about little kids being referred to as attention deficit, when it may be that they’re just immature in their development,” Dr Metz told Working Mother, suggesting that an obvious strategy with children who seem easily distracted could be to simplify their environment.
Recycling campaign gets a boost
Families struggling with recycling their rubbish have been given a helping hand by the Government through the publication of a national recycling list.
The list of suitable material is now simply paper, cardboard, rigid plastics, tins and cans, with explanations given of why some items we might mistakenly recycle – like disposable coffee cups and paper towels – might be better off binned or composted, while glass needs to be recycled separately in bottle banks.
Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Denis Naughten said that he hoped the list would improve “the quality of the material that goes in the recycle bin”, as it will “help to ensure that these items are actually recycled, as opposed to being contaminated accidentally by householders and sent to landfill”.
The full list can be seen at recyclinglistireland.ie
