Developing the Child's Mind Through Educational Toys

When the adjective "educational" is applied to anything, be it television shows, books, games, and especially toys, one tends to associate words like boring, tedious, dull, and so on to whatever it may be. Yet in recent years the importance of assistance like educational toys in the developing child has become not only popular but quite necessary to promote the growth of healthy brain function and skills adults use on a day to day basis. But not to worry these are not the educational toys of old, they are bright, colorful, spark imagination and are so engrossing many times the child doesn't even realize all they are learning.

The first 8 or so years of a child's life are extremely crucial to the primary development of both physical skills and mental capacities. It is said that a child's IQ can be increased by about 50 or so points in early childhood through the proper stimulation. While the idea of playing classical music to your baby in hopes of increasing intelligence is still being widely debated about effectiveness, educational toys designed specifically to encourage basic math, science, and creative concepts have been proven to work.

The critical stages of the child's primary development can be broken down into parts and they mark new beginnings and exciting changes in your baby's maturity. The period marked from birth to about age 3 include what are called, gross motor skills. These gross motor skills include: sitting, walking, lifting of the head, crawling, balancing, and some beginning hand-eye coordination. The next stage is roughly between age 3 and 5, and includes the development of fine motor skills.

The fine motor skills are the use of small muscle movements, usually associated with fingers in coordination with the eyes. Also during this important time, there are rapid changes in the child's cognitive (thought processes) and language. Now these stages are not passive procedures, even though they can develop on their own to an extent. They need to be actively stimulated and worked to ensure full development, so when the child enters into the next stage of school years they will have all the necessary prerequisite skills needed so they can be ready to learn.

Educational toys provide a great way to guarantee a child is growing throughout the stages of development. Blocks, for example, are a fantastic way to cultivate the fine motor skills because they require hand and finger coordination. But not just any blocks will do, blocks like the Magna-Tiles by the Valtech Corporation are what to utilize because they are designed specifically for childhood development. They are 3D magnetic building tiles that can either be clear or colored and come in 32 or 100 piece sets.

The Magna-Tiles help in developing a child's ability to pattern, shape recognize, understand magnetic principals, and help in 3 dimensional thinking. They are also widely used in early childhood education programs. Along the same line as Magna-Tiles, there are WEDGiTS from ImagAbility. WEDGiTS are a type of building block that can be nested, stacked, lined, and wedged together to create millions of different shapes, creatures, and designs; the only limitation is the child's imagination. The multidimensional, challenging building sets boosts the cognitive process by stimulating the creative process and providing a chance to let the child's mind wander to far-off places.

Another useful educational toy is the Oball from Rhino Toys. This amazing and uniquely designed toy comes from the Rhino Toy founder David Silvergate, who just so happens to have a degree in Physics. The Oball is a sculpted light weight ball that is formed from overlapping rings, which makes it easy to catch, throw, hold, hit, and kick. The Oball is the farthest thing from an ordinary ball and is sure to inspire a child's imagination, while developing gross and fine motor skills.

Educational toys are vital in developing a child's mind. They are fun, promote creativeness, and help in the necessary skills a child has to master for school years and life. They come in all forms, shapes, and colors so maybe the term "educational" might not be so boring after all.

Paper Crafting In Schools: Scrapbooking Concepts Used In The Educational System

Scrapbookers have a few benefits which they can experience during and after their scrapbooking and paper crafting activities. The first of these is included in artistic hobbies themselves; they give them a chance to flush through emotions and experiences which makes for better emotional health overtime. The second gift is they can perfect a certain set of skills through practice. And a third gift that scrapbooking gives can be seen as a collection: the ability to incorporate new lessons, new concepts and new and innovative thinking into other parts of their lives as a result of what took place during the scrapbooking.

For a practical example of the first concept, consider apparent scrapbooking a collection of family photos for hours at a time, dipping deep into the moments of flow where new thought enters and time suspends, and coming to some conclusion that is a "lightbulb" moment so to speak. Those insightful realizations which are likely to take place when the logical mind takes a break and the creative mind leads the wheel can be very helpful for the improvement of our lives especially in the realm of those things which we end up taking into our scrapbooking practices: family moments, individual goals and treasures and concepts which make us feel more alive.

Paper crafting in schools usually takes one of two forms. The second is similar to the first benefit above, where the creative mind leads scrapbookers to memorialize emotional events and the result brings a fulfilling feeling. Examples of this are the handmade Valentines, Mother's Day and Father's Day cards which many children are encouraged to make early on in their education.

The second way scrapbook concepts are traditionally used in schools is for learning purposes. Learning to spell through crafts is a practice used in schools by teachers who direct children to cut letters out from paper, to add them together, to make sounds and to rearrange the collection of them for words. Somewhere in the country there is teacher with several pieces of paper representing different animals and letters and a class being led to interpret these into words. Although we often see preschoolers using the scissors, the word cut outs and the collage of photos and letters to bridge new concepts with the attentiveness of creative work, the idea of crafting to solidify "left brain" concepts is not sectioned off strictly to early childhood education.

As middle-school students are urged to explore the meaning of collages through group projects which require poster board and symbolic representations of the main points of material they've been studying, and as middle and high school students are encouraged to make yearly science projects which combine a multitude of pictures, graphs and words to express thoughts, the main elements of scrapbooking in educational systems becomes more and more clear.

The reason we don't stop scrapbooking at any age is simply what many in the educational system have figured out; we don't just think in terns of sentences. We think in terms of symbols and pieces coming together. And we also find it easier to remember information when we progress through a project which allows us to play with those symbols and collect them as unifying concepts reinforcing the same idea.