Learning for Growth - Children
Editorial Idea - Today more and more parents are looking for ways to help prepare their children for school. When you go out to shop for educational toys, where do you begin?
Learning Is The Best Way for Growth
Today more and more parents are looking for ways to help prepare their children for school. When you go out to shop for educational toys, where do you begin?
No matter how promising, if a toy is not fun, it will gather dust. Play for young children is important for their social, emotional, intellectual and physical development. When children play, they are learning how to get along with others, to use their imagination, to deal with their emotions and feelings, to act out adult behaviour, to develop their fine and gross motor skills, to concentrate, to problem solve and much more. Children are born with a natural curiosity and a desire to learn.
Children learn best with activities that are geared at their own level. There needs to be a balance between a child’s abilities and their desire to learn a new skill. You can’t expect toddlers to print their names. They have neither the physical ability, that is the fine motor skills, nor the desire or interest to learn how to print.
An educational toy is any toy that actively involves a child physically, mentally or socially. A toy that is open-ended allows a child to play with it in many different ways. If a child sits and passively watches a toy perform, there is little educational value in the toy. Children must be able to control the outcome of toys for them to be considered educational.
Activities need to be appropriate to the age of the child. Children learn when activities are interesting and challenging without being too difficult. Remember that when a child experiences success with a new task, they will want to learn more.
Children have individual learning styles. A method of learning that works for one child may not work for another. Even within a family one child may master a skill quickly while another finds it difficult. Some children seem to learn easily and naturally, others need a lot of repetition and review, and for others rote learning is best. Parents must recognize these differences and avoid comparing children.
Children learn from concrete, active experiences. There are many abstract concepts that are learned best through hands-on activities. Concepts such as hard, soft, thick, thin, furry, fast and slow are just a few. “Round” takes on new meaning when a child learns that you can’t get a square peg into a round hole. Many children are able to grasp new concepts more easily when they use manipulatives-things that they actually touch, feel and hold in their hands.
Basic Skills
Infancy is a time for learning about the environment by developing the senses of sight, touch, sound, taste and smell. Visually appealing and pleasant-sounding mobiles and activity gyms will attract an infant’s attention and encourage eye-focusing. Clutch balls and rattles develop the basic skills of reaching and grasping.
Increasing mobility and greater co-ordination demand different types of toys to stimulate healthy development. Fill-and-dump play and toys for stacking, nesting and sorting are helpful in the development of these skills.
Splashing in water is a lot of fun for children. Any water toy that allows children to learn about water’s properties, such as volume and capacity, empty and full, or floating and sinking, are educational.
Children need to act out their environment to help them understand the world around them and to prepare themselves for adult roles. Toys which enhance imaginative play are very important to children’s healthy development, as they help them to play out and to resolve daily occurrences in both their own and the adult world. Playing house, pirates or trains is role-playing, and through this mode of play they develop skills in values, attitudes, language and patience. In a child’s imagination, a doll lives, cries, laughs, eats and shares life’s experiences. What better way to teach a child about life where anything is possible than to encourage imaginative play.
Toys That Teach
Building sets come in all shapes and sizes and for all ages. For the younger child, building sets consist of simple blocks, stacking toys and put-together and take-apart toys such as Duplo and Mega Bloks. An older child can manipulate smaller pieces and build more complex structures. Gear systems, motors and electrical components can be added to a set to extend play value. Building a structure includes following a set of instructions step by step, then working with words and/or 3-D pictures to understand the building process. This teaches patience, dexterity, motor skills, creativity, eye-hand coordination, problem-solving, proportion and dimension.
There are a number of arts and crafts kits available today that encourage experimenting with different materials (sand, clay, felt) and different hobbies (corking, weaving, tapestry, stained glass). These teach experimentation, eye-hand coordination, fine motor skills, patience and creativity. Science kits introduce and demonstrate specific scientific principles and phenomena. Whether they introduce your child to magnets or the human skeleton, these experiences will hopefully encourage and foster a further interest in the subject.
Games and puzzles can also be educational. Games teach cooperation, competition, strategy and sportsmanship. They also help children understand that rules are necessary and allow children to experience winning and losing. There are games for everyone and every mood-silly games, thinking games, games of chance, games of skill, word games, memory games, matching games, trivia games, group games and solitary games. Puzzles teach concentration, manual dexterity and the perception of shape, colour, size and form. Assembling a puzzle requires logical thinking and learning through trial and error. They are an excellent preparation for learning to read.