Playing Is Educational

In this day and age it is really important to start teaching your children certain fundamentals. It is important when they hit their toddler years to start working on the basic fundamentals. This can be anything from the alphabet to teaching them their numbers. Teaching them manners is another way to help start your child off right.

The great thing nowadays, is that there are so many different ways that you can teach your child and make it fun for them at the same time. Toddler educational toys are a great way to start teaching your child the basics. Educational toys are interactive so it will keep your toddlers attention.

In the world of children’s toys, nothing meets the longevity of toy building blocks. Infants and toddlers thrive through hands-on activities. Brightly colored building blocks are appealing to babies, as they help build sensory skills by encouraging sight, touch, and sound.

Playing with toy building blocks helps toddlers develop motor sills and improve hand-eye coordination. Gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and even muscle development can see positive results from playing with building blocks. Children – elementary school age kids- who play with blocks develop social skills and more creative play. Working together with their peers, they can build castles, forts, club houses- the possibilities are endless.

Toddlers have short attention spans and they love to move! How many times have you chased a gleeful toddler around your house? When hosting a birthday party for your toddler, it’s important to have games tailored to their needs.

One of my favorite toddler games is the “silly obstacle course.” All you have to do is set up an obstacle course easy enough for toddlers to navigate. You can pile up sofa cushions for toddlers to climb over and drape a sheet over a table to create a tunnel the kids have to crawl through. You can also make a forest with bunches of balloons for the toddlers to run through. I’ve used obstacle courses at my two toddlers’ birthday parties with great success.

Educational toys are an important part of early childhood learning. Basic toys like blocks and big puzzles teach young kids how to map out solutions and explore new ways of thinking. Almost all toys of this genre teach kids to identify colors and numbers, which are both building blocks to a more advanced learning ability.

Of all the early childhood toys on the market, I believe that ABC blocks are one of the very best. Not only do these blocks allow children to use their imaginations to construct the simplest or the most elaborate towers and buildings, but the letters help teach the kids to read and spell. Who knew that such a basic toy could be so versatile when it comes to childhood learning?

Teaching kids how to tell time does not have to feel like a boring math lesson. There are plenty of ways to make time telling lessons engaging. One of my favorite methods is using an oversized, child-friendly clock.

After lessons on what the big and little hands mean, as well as how to count to 60, I test the kids on what they’ve learned. I’ll give the first child a clock and say “The time is now 1:15. Could you please show me 1:15?” Then the child puts the big and little hands on the appropriate numbers. If they get it right then they pass the clock to the next child and make up a time of day for that child to put on the clock. The giant clock makes its way around the circle until everyone has had a turn.

These days, parents are turning to multimedia in order to keep their kids entertained and stimulated. It’s enough to make some of us wonder what happened to the simplicity of teaching through books and human interaction. For a certain generation of Americans, Dr. Seuss books represented one of the most prominent tools utilized in early childhood education.

In his remarkable run of popular kids’ books, Seuss broached serious topics such as war, ethnic diversity and discrimination in ways that appealed to children. His silly rhyming structure helped to mask the serious moral lessons he tried to teach, and the dressed-up language made the message more palatable and less preachy. And of course the artwork alone makes these books worth a return trip even decades after that first read.

In recent years, scientific evidence has shown that people learn in vastly different ways. Visual learners need to see information written down before they can fully internalize it, and auditory learners prefer to hear the information presented out loud. Early in childhood, however, we are all tactile learners to one degree or another. We learn best by actively participating in the process.

As the foundation for reading and writing, teaching phonics for kids should be high on your priority list. Phonics Hot Dots cater to every learning style, as they can be used in a number of ways according to a parent’s preference and a child’s skill level. These flash cards are meant to be used and reused for as long as it takes young children to master the basics of speech sounds and elementary reading. Advanced kids can even get a head start on their kindergarten cohorts by working with learning materials at home under the tutelage of a trusty parent.

Experts in early childhood development believe that early and frequent play with educational toys is extremely beneficial to developmental skills in children. When choosing educational toys for your child, some things to keep in mind are:

~The child’s interests and skills, the toy’s durability
~Whether the toy teaches communication or motor skills
~How easy the toy is to use
~Whether the toy will stimulate creativity or cognitive thinking
~Whether the toy can be used without an adult present
~Whether the toy can help the child express emotions and interact with others.

Above all else, early childhood activities and toys should be fun.  Read labels for appropriate age ranges and safety warnings, and keep track of toy recalls in the media.  Choose a safe storage place for toys and check their level of functioning every few weeks, repairing or discarding damaged toys.  If possible, toys should be cleaned every so often as well!

Do your kids sit on the couch all day playing video games or watching television? If they do, then it’s probably about time they tried a new after-school activity. Younger children can especially benefit from activities that incorporate learning with fun.

Buy a few wooden puzzles and see how your children react to them. Keep in mind that they may need some help putting them together. Remember that participating in activities with your children can strengthen your relationship and let you get to know your child better.

When people think of puppet show theater, they probably are thinking of television programs, like the Muppets and Sesame Street. It’s true that the characters in these programs are puppets, but they are far different than the puppets that came about hundreds of years ago in China.A puppet is a figure whose movements are controlled by someone through, strings, rods, or hand movements. Early puppets were thought to be used as tribal ritual masks, and had hinged jaws and jointed skulls. Somewhere along the line these puppet masks evolved into doll-like figures with moving appendages. Hand puppets were common during early times, because they were easy to transport and manipulate.

Many cultures used puppets for ritual and entertainment. Egyptians crafted jointed, terra cotta puppets while Native Americans used puppets during ceremonial dances and harvest festivals