Guide To Choosing Educational Toys For Children

In the last few years, parents started getting more and more interested in choosing all sorts of educational toys for their children. Because a parent wishes the best for his child, a toy that is labeled as educational is very likely to be bought easier than others.

But what is an educational child toy?

Well, there is no definition of the term "educational toy" from what I know. However, what I do know is that an educational toy is a toy that helps a child learn something good, something that will help in the future. Play is the most important activity of any child. Learning thru play is a reality; it can and it is done unknowingly every time your child plays. The parent must however control the play so that it remains on an educational course.

There are also toys that aren't exactly educational for children … Toy guns and other such toys that somehow tend to violence and other bad behaviors are not recommended. You must avoid such toys. Although these toys may be a good source of fun for youngsters, on the long term they will only do harm.

How do educational child toys and games work?

A I said above, play is a child‘s main activity. During the play, a child learns many new things. Toys and games must be integrated into the play to make their job. This is not hard, because play consists of several games that require using toys. Any toy can be educational, as long as it does not develop a bad behavior, and it is used in your child's play. A toy must be used in order to be educational for a child.

To be clearer about how educational child toys and games work, I will take one example: Hide and seek.

Let's take a look at Hide and Seek. You do remember this game, right? Can you remember the rules? Ok, I will still list them here, and comment on them and explain its educational side.

The first rule is that every player must obey the rules. I know, I know it's obvious, but if players would not respect the rules, would there be any point for the rules to exist? Every child must learn and obey them, or else they are not allowed to play the game. The educational part of this is that the child learns to accept the fact that he cannot do everything he wants, that there are some limits and he must not pass them in order to keep his privileges.

One of the children in the group is chosen to count to 100 at the home tree (this helps young children learn the numbers in a pleasurable way, not like in school), without peeking (this educated the child to use fair play in all areas of the life). Meanwhile, the others must find a good hiding place, one that is both hard to discover and close to the home tree. This stimulates the child to think fast to the best solution to a given task.

After he finished counting to 100, the child says "Ready or not, here I come" and then he must search for the other players. He must be very careful. Once he finds a player hiding, he must run back to the home tree and shout his name. He must be vigilant so that he can hear any sound that might indicate the position of the other players.

The players who are already spotted must not tell where the others are hiding. This too educates children to use fair play.

The first player spotted is the next one to count to 100.

You'd never think that hide and seek, one of the most common games in childhood, could be so educational, right? Yes, it is a very educational game. And it's not the only one. Pick any game you liked playing when you were a child, and analyze its rules, as I did above. You'll be amazed.

Hide and Seek is oriented mainly towards developing fair play and physical skills.

Here's another example of educational child game that helps developing more advanced skills: Monopoly.

I won't bore you with its rules. This game introduces your child into the basics of modern business life. Acquiring high value properties, negotiation, taxes. Yup! This game educates your child to become the biggest businessperson on the Wall Street. Monopoly has rules that are more complex and it requires greater concentration. Specific jargon and names that mean much to the entrepreneurs get your child closer the world of business.

Toys are amongst the first objects a child gets in contact. Understanding how things work is a direct result of solving problems with toys like "Why this fits there?", "Does that fit here?", "How big is that?". Toys help your child learn to grab, pull, push, synchronize the movement of the head with that of the hand.

Toys are indispensable when playing. Playing with a great variety of educational child toys helps your child develop his imagination, understand that different objects have different properties, and learn how to combine them to create other interesting objects.

Read the whole article on choosing educational child toys.

About The Author

Eugen Lisov is the creator of Child-Toys-Guide.com, a site focused on helping parents worldwide to choose the best toys for their children. If you offer your child a bad toy, it's the same as if you don't offer your youngster any toy. Please feel free to browse my site; it will only help you when choosing toys for your child.

image by: toys4kids.co.nz

Non-Violent EDUCATIONAL Toys

The key to choosing the right toy for your child is in developing on their strengths and learning style. When choosing the proper educational toys for our child's development, some of the first questions we need to ask is, Are they non-violent? and, Do they send the proper message? Unfortunately it is nearly impossible to keep our children completely away from all the weapon wielding animals and shop-aholic mall-dolls they'll see as they are more and more influenced by media and peers. That being said, we as parents do have complete control over their environment during the first and most crucial developmental years of their young lives. And, there are a number of criteria we need to take into consideration when determining if toys are actually educational and learning specific. By that I mean what specific skills do toys help develop, and can they be used for more than one skill-set.

What as both new and experienced parents should we be considering? We need to first educate and understand for ourselves which skills our children need to further develop and strengthen, as well as which skills to build on. The following is meant as a starting point to lead us in the right direction, to help us understand basic learning styles and to give a better understanding of the benificial aspects of all educational toys we choose for our children. I strongly suggest you continue through the following sections. By taking a closer look at learning styles early, we can help our children develop and learn through play.

-Going back to my highschool years, I recall sitting in chemistry taking notes from Mr. What's-his-name, barely able to keep up as he dictated from an old beat up green scribbler. He paced up and down the isles trying to cool down after just finishing a senior phys-ed class. Wiping his face with his forearm, sweat would gather at his furrowed brow while he spoke and run down to drip off the end of his nose onto his white canvas high-tops. I nearly failed chemistry that year. My problem? I couldn't remember half of my notes and lectures no matter how many times I reviewed and crammed when it came exam time. That may sound odd after the description of my teacher, but not once you understand what my learning style is.

The Auditory learning style has the young child most interested in musical and noise-making educational toys. In later years the child will be speaking out their ideas. They enjoy telling stories and jokes and generally find spelling comes quite easily. They can be a good reader but would thrive with books played on a cassette or CD. They can also be musically talented and love to record and listen to themself on tape, have an excellent memory for names, places and trivia and would probably have a rather extensive vocabulary at an early age. Encourage your auditory learner to play word games or to tell you stories while you type it out for them to see.

The Kinesthetic style is one where the child processes knowledge through physical stimuli, they need to touch and feel the world around them. They will be highly active, not able to sit still for very long. Tends to communicate with their body anguage, "talks with their hands", and would rather show you something than tell you about it. They would be the type of child who enjoys thriller ride at the amusement park and are naturally good at sports. Children who are kinetic learners are unfortunately labelled with attention deficient disorder often times incorrectly. Physical stimulation is the key to this child's learning. Sign language at an early age will help verbal language development. Toys with a combination of both movement and sound. Acting out scenes and stories themselves or with puppets as a hands-on activity as well as experiments and projects. While reading let them partake in another activity such as rocking, chewing gum or walking around.

With the Visual learning style, your child will have a tendency to visualize things, and learn better through viewing or picturing images. They enjoy drawing and painting, and may be fascinated with machinery. Love building blocks and later puzzles and mazes. Once they hit school they are the child accused of being a daydreamer. Search for educational toys such as memory games to create visuals images and patterns, similar board games are helpful too. Do not put picture books away after as soon as the child begins reading, and when reading together from larger volumes with little or no pictures, pause and encourage imagining the scene, characters etc... at interesting intervals. Have the child write and draw with different colored markers or pencils, or even have them write with pictograms.

Going back to my highschool story above and referencing the list, I was and still am a Visual learner. Today, especially when putting together things for my son, I'll get out all of the pieces, then read over the instructions Then most times I'll use the diagram and the "this goes here" arrows to figure everything out. A learning style is basically the way someone prefers to learn, whether consciously or sub-consciously. I say sub-consciously as not everyone is aware they learn better from a certain method, but their brain will work and store information more efficiently with one method over the others. In saying this though, the way you learn has nothing to do with your intelligence or IQ, and there is no correct or incorrect way to learn.

Parents also tend to have a preference for one of these learning styles, but where as these styles are not genetic, it is not unusual for parents to have a different preference. Understanding your child's style and then effectively choosing the proper educational toys to benefit that style is key. With this understanding you can also learn which style(s) your child needs to strengthen. Today most information presented in schools, approximately 80 percent, is auditory. The unfortunate part of this is that only approximately 10 percent of students learn best through auditory delivery.

On the site attached to this article you will find a toy chart which gives excellent examples of a large number of educational toys all meant to enhance a child's learning style. Click Our Products and then the Toy Finder Chart. At the bottom right corner of this chart you will see a heading for a Learning Styles Chart. All of the educational toys listed here fall into one of the categories we have discussed above. You can also see here, under Product Awards, that these products have won numerous awards from many different groups and studies.

About The Author
Derrick Logan is a father of two who realized there's not much web content from a Dad's point of view. He's working on changing that!
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d.logan@ask-your-father.com

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