Learning through play!
Do you agree that learning could be more fun if this is through play and interaction? Of course, yes! Kids learn a lot through play during their primitive years as opposed to learning later in life due to our brain's neural plasticity. Hence if your child is 2 years of age and has not yet started talking or walking, early intervention is absolutely essential at this point. Apart from also consulting a Speech-language Pathologist or a Speech therapist, it is also essential that the parents and caregivers play with their child as much as they can. Play not only promotes language development but also helps in overall brain development such as cognition. Following are a few examples of toys including sensory toys that can promote language, cognition including critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. 1) Wooden Puzzles and Matching flashcard puzzles
These puzzles for the kids are a great educational toy that is designed to help learn about different nouns and objects such as animals, numbers, shapes, vehicles, and fruits. These wooden puzzles are also a great tool for strengthening a child's cognitive, motor, and pattern recognition skills, visual perception skills, and eye-hand coordination.
2) Realistic Sliceable Fruits and Vegetables:
These realistic sliceable fruits and vegetables toy helps in developing a child's mind, practical ability, creativity, thinking ability, and also improve their eye-hand coordination including hand flexibility. They can also be a great tool for pretend play games.
3) Multicolor Stacking Blocks and rings
- Bright colors promote visual development.
- A child learns about different, colors, sizes, and shapes.
- Strengthens eye-hand coordination
- Improves gross motor skills
- Stimulates different senses such as touch and vision.
4) Nesting multicolor Eggs
- Improvs a child's matching ability of different colors, shapes, and sizes
- Improves thinking skills, problem-solving skills
- Promotes cognitive development
- The bright colors stimulate different senses such as vision and touch.
- Improves gross motor skills
5) Musical Toys
Musical toys make a great sensory toy and a tool to stimulate a child's different senses especially hearing.
Pros:
- Stimulates three different senses like vision, touch, and hearing
- Develops cause and effect relationship
- Improves eye-hand coordination
- May develop verbal or non-verbal imitation if the kids try to imitate the sound of a toy that makes a sound of a dog, a train sound, etc.
- Improves gross motor and fine motor skills.
6) Sensory Toys
Kids learn a lot by exploring the world around them through the use of their different senses such as vision, touch, hearing, taste, etc. Hence it is essential that we as a parent give them maximum opportunity to learn through the exploration of different senses and expose them to toys of different sizes, shapes, color, and texture. Following are some toys that promote sensory development in kids. They are especially beneficial for kids with developmental delays such as autism, ADHD, ADD which also helps them calm down and deal with anxiety-related issues.
Flash cards and children's story books are another great resourse for promoting language development in kids.
8) Flash Cards for "Wh" questions such as what, where and why.
Sometimes the kids need to be taught on how to understand and respond the different types of "wh" questions. Otherwise, they might exhibit difficulty understanding and responding to "wh" questions to carry out a conversation and to socialize with his/her friends, caregivers, parents or teachers. Luckily, we now have flascards even to develop a child's comprehension and expression of "wh" questions.
