Early innovative educational playthings

Hooletsi began as a project by the managing director Yvonne Allan.

Yvonne originally worked in the antenatal, labour, postnatal wards and special care baby unit in a general hospital with a specialised maternity unit and around 15-20 years ago noticed that depending on what she was wearing baby's attention could be held, this fascinated her and was stored for future use.

10 years later practising as a nursery nurse supporting health professionals in all their clinical duties, Yvonne also facilitated a baby group for over 4 years. Building on her previous experience and studying baby's reactions to different stimuli found that when contented all babies would focus and show interest in any highly contrasting colours for lengthy periods. Yvonne then experimented with various combinations of colours and patterns and discovered that white and black contrasted with red worked best. This has now been demonstrated to work even with irritable and unsettled babies. 

Yvonne attended a "Solihull" training course where she was shown the relationship between brain activity and different visual stimuli, this piqued Yvonne's curiosity and she started researching this phenomenon on the internet and was truly surprised to find so much corroborating clinical evidence from all over the world (please see references below) but also crucially that this early brain stimulation was a strong precursor to early language and communication.

This struck a chord with Yvonne and she started to collate the clinical evidence along with her experience and also many, many anecdotal stories from hundreds of mothers. Yvonnes conclusion was that parents and expectant parents need to be aware that exposing baby to strongly contrasting colours from birth gives baby the early brain stimulation which can mean earlier non verbal communication leading to earlier speech coupling this with the original benefits of being able to hold baby's attention and to help content fractious and irritable children and the best way of implementing all of these was some form of educational toy which would appeal to baby and parents.

So the idea of hoolet was born Yvonne knew that it had to have highly contrasting colours but also to be aesthetically pleasing. Owls in greek mythology have traditionally been regarded as wise and Scottish gaelic mythology also classifies the all seeing owl as clever and quick and helpful. hoolet went through many different design stages finally settling as the owl with pointy ears which allows little fingers to hold it.

hoolet the owl has grown from strength to strength amazing all parents who have used it with their babies. 

Please see our "how to buy page" and we will walk you through buying your very own hoolet to give you the earliest start in training your baby's brain.   

References:

Ongoing scientific research carried out under the auspices of Heriot Watt university and data to support all the information above will be published shortly.

Interesting articles on related subjects include Viv Groskop Art and baby Guardian 2008