As a parent, your youth may have been full of toys like dolls, blocks, racing sets, rocking horses, and wagons. Yet your own child has been born into a world that’s awash with tablets, smartphones, and computers. Yes, computers are wildly educational, but you likely believe that your children spend an inordinate amount of time staring at a screen and not enough time playing on the floor.
Traditional toys still have educational value, even in the new millennium. Here’s a sampling of 5 of the best toys to help kids learn.
Groovie Math And Patterning Blocks
In the new century, kid’s blocks have been re-engineered to appeal not only to the budding architect but also to introduce concepts of sorting, order, and patterns to young learners. Blocks may be the simplest and most basic of toys, but designed well, they allow opportunities for creative re-imagination.
Groovie Math and Patterning Blocks are hand-crafted with two grooved sides that’ll create tactile interest among the younger set and develop small motor skills among the older. If the blocks are oriented correctly, they’ll lock rather than slide off one another, allowing for stronger edifices. They come in sets of twenty-eight and are brightly painted with numbers, symbols, shapes, and patterns that, when arranged in a myriad of ways, create even bigger patterns.
Read With Me Scout
For toddlers and preschoolers, one of the most engaging learning-to-read toys is Read With Me Scout (or Read With Me Violet). Scout and Violet are friendly-looking, plush stuffed animals with powerful inner computers. Packaged with a set of interactive books, the plush toy reads the text aloud to build word recognition and reading skills through rhyme and repetition. The toy asks questions in order to develop reading comprehension. Given its personality, the stuffed animal can be used apart from the books for good old imaginative play.
Symphony In B
Whether you want to introduce your child to the joys of music, or just want them to have fun, you’ll succeed with Symphony In B. This colorful, interactive toy may be one of the coolest gigs around.
Pre-programmed with fifteen orchestral masterpieces, Symphony in B allows your child to choose which musical instruments she wants to hear play the symphony. All she has to do is move the pieces. Not only does this toy serve as a great introduction to classical music, but the colorful, molded toy instruments can be used separately for imaginative play. Furthermore, by switching up instrument combinations, deciding between pianissimo or fortissimo, and choosing where to start and stop, your budding conductor can create–and record–her own arrangements.
Master Kitz
Geared toward the artist in your family of kindergarten age or older, each Master Kitz provides all the tools your child will need to reproduce a famous painting such as Van Gogh’s The Starry Night or Monet’s Water Lilies.
Yet this is not your grandmother’s paint-by-numbers kit. Each package comes with rollers, stencils, and nice thick oil crayons along with simple directions as well as some background on the painters and the paintings. This toy is a masterful, interactive, hands-on way to introduce your body-painting, bohemian wild child to the wonders of art and art history.
LeapFrog LeapPad3
Any list of the best educational toys for children born in the new millennium has to include at least one computer device. When it comes to educational toys geared toward babies through first grade and beyond, LeapFrog is the way to go. They’ve developed an entire line of computer devices all geared toward age-appropriate advancement in letter mastery, phonics, early reading, pattern recognition, math skills, and many other academic benchmarks. One of the best is LeapFrog’s LeapPad3.
Although you’ll be limited to buying games from the LeapFrog store, all of the LeapFrog LeapPad3’s educational games have been developed by folks with a lot of advanced degrees in their mastered subjects, yet they’re made with an eye toward fun. Though this unit may be a tad more expensive than some other hand-held computer game consoles, it’s a lot cheaper than having your iPad trashed when junior spills juice on it.
