subject: Educational Toys: Often Simple Is Best [print this page] Educational toys are so important to a child's development. The best way for a child to learn is through play and doing something they enjoy and can interact with, and often, the earliest and simplest educational toys are the best.
Take building blocks as an example. These simple wooden cubes have been given to babies for decades to inspire play, and can help brain development in a number of ways. Even when babies are very little, they love to grasp hold of blocks, which helps them grasp the concept of special awareness.
Colourful building blocks are great for teaching children colours in a fun way; games played by parents range from the very basic asking children to point out the green or blue block, through to asking children to stack up the colours in a certain order.
Building blocks will also help young children to learn the concept of 'big' and 'small'. Children will be fascinated by building the blocks up high in a tower and watching them fall down. This also helps their concentration and allows them to think about and understand the concept of balance.
Another of the traditional educational toys which helps in development to this day is the humble jigsaw. Of course, very small children will not have the patience for large, multi-piece, complicated jigsaws, but once they get the hang of them, jigsaws help greatly in the development of children's special awareness in their brains. Spending time puzzling over how the pieces and shapes fit together is great for brain development, not to mention the sense of reward and achievement they feel once they have completed a whole jigsaw.
Educational toys like this can teach them a great deal in the basics of concentration, patience and hard work, all of which are important qualities in all stages of life.
These two examples show that children don't necessarily need all-singing, all-dancing expensive modern educational toys to enjoy play and learn from them. Very often, if a toy does too much already without much input from the child's own imagination, the child will become bored with it as they are not being allowed to use their imagination and creativity. As the saying goes, the simple things in life are often the best.
Give a child a jigsaw puzzle to solve, and often the anticipation of the finished picture is reward and motivation enough to keep them amused for long periods of time, and while a child is studiously puzzling away with educational toys, parents can of course enjoy a well-earned rest and get about doing other important tasks.
