WHY IS PLAYTIME NOT ALL PLAY?
Have you ever told you child – now enough of play and time to study?
If yes, then you may want to consider reading this blog.
Let us understand the neurology of the brain first. At birth, an average baby’s brain is about a quarter of the size of the average adult brain. Incredibly, it doubles in size in the first year. It keeps growing to about 80% of adult size by age 3 and 90% – nearly full grown – by age 5, which essentially means that most of a child’s brain development takes place between the years of 0 to 5 more than it does in any other period of his life. As parents or educators, this is crucial for us to understand, as everything we expose the child to in this age particularly – information or experiences; will make a very deep impact on this growing mind.
As we know it’s the connection between the brain cells (neurons) that really make the brain work. And we can positively influence these connections through constructive play through educational toys.
WHICH TOYS HELP IN EDUCATING AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
Let’s break this down in order to map educatiomal toys that help in different stages of a child’s brain growth:
Infants (birth to 12 months): Here sensory growth is very prominent which involves the maturation of the five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. In this stage, exposing children to toys with different materials does wonder to enhance their sensory growth. Black and white flash cards or high contrast cards help a lot with vision development. Similarly, musical instruments like playing the drums, xylophone or colorful wooden rattles are great for developing their auditory sense.
Similarly, providing kids with varied materials to touch like crochet rattles or wooden neem teethers go a long way in developing their sense of touch and feel.
Toddler (1 to 3 yr): Here as the child matures and becomes a toddler, more physical play activities start kicking in and become essential in motor development. Cognitive development also starts to occur and playing with open-ended toys such as building blocks, balancing activities and jigsaw puzzles, dominos, abstract thinking puzzles go a long way in strengthening the connection between the neurons.
Although, to many adults, children’s activities whilst they are playing may look meaningless, they are important to and for the child, promoting the development of concentration and attention. Early intervention and exposure to these educational toys helps in nurturing their brain, improving hand-eye coordination, enhancing their critical thinking skills, building corrective learning, enhancing their imagination and creative thinking and building a host of life-skills that becomes an early foundation to a child’s growth.
We have curated toys that help in enhancing these skills at every stage – from crochet rattles that enhances sensory growth, animal tetris to build on spatial skills, neem teethers to ease a child’s teething journey to balancing dolphin and balancing stone blocks for building higher concentration and improving a child’s attention span. Adding these toys to your child’s playtime largely helps in enhancing this growth!
