A lot of parents worry whether their children are learning the right things, and how they can help their kids nurture those skills. One of the best ways to encourage your child’s development is through toy play, you can find the best ones on playedo.com.au.
Toys are fun, sure, but they’re also educational! Below, we’ve outlined 7 ways that playing with toys can help your child learn important skills.
1. Push cars and trucks
Push cars and trucks are a good way for children to develop hand-eye coordination and dexterity. Kids can push different types of vehicles around, making them go over ramps or around obstacles. To encourage creativity, build an obstacle course with blocks, paper cups, books or anything else you have available. Then let your child push the vehicle through the course. To encourage counting, hide objects in the blocks and cups so your child has to find them as he pushes the car through the obstacle course.
2. Play dough
Play dough is a great way for kids to get creative while they are learning. Spend time with your kids making different shapes with play dough. Encourage them to make different patterns as well. Make sure you let them use their hands to do this activity because it helps develop fine motor skills that are so important when writing and drawing.
3. Puzzles
Puzzles are another great toy for a young child to learn from. Choose puzzles that have large pieces that are easy for small hands to pick up and move around correctly. As your child plays with the puzzle, take time to teach him new vocabulary words such as up, down, left and right.
4. Get Down to Play
Spend time at the playground, going for walks, and taking a bike ride together. Notice what colors you see in nature. Point them out to your toddler or preschooler and try to label the objects by color.
5. Learn Your Letters
Fold paper into simple shapes, such as a triangle or circle. Together, trace the shape with a crayon or marker. Next, make letters from the traced outline. Write upper-case letters on one side of the paper and lower-case letters on the other side so your child can see the differences between both sets of letters. You can also write some words on separate pieces of paper using both upper and lower case letters, then have your child match each letter with its corresponding upper-case or lower-case letter.
6. Play With Patterns
Cut out different shapes from colored construction paper and combine them in different ways to form patterns you can talk about to your child. Talk about things like stripes, rows and columns. Make up stories that incorporate these patterns and ask your child to repeat them back to you while you play together.
7. Toys that teach math
Learning math is important. It helps children understand how numbers work in the real world, and it’s a skill they’ll use throughout their lives. But math can be hard to teach, because it often involves abstract concepts like fractions and negative numbers. These toys can make learning math fun and accessible to kids of all ages.