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Games for Education
Learning is made easier if it is mixed with fun and play, especially for children. Playing takes a vital role in the growth and development of a child starting from infancy to early and late childhood.
During the first months, the behavior of an infant is purely reflexive, but as he becomes acquainted with the objects and activities outside his body, he starts to react by reaching out to grasp, feel, and manipulate whatever it is that catches his attention. The more they play, the more they become aware of their environment. At this stage, parents can help their children’s learning process through games that can be done simply by showing or holding out a toy for the child to reach out and grasp. This helps the child to develop and control his motor responses, sensory impressions, and physical motions.
Early childhood refers to the first two to seven years in the lifespan of a child. At these ages, children show an increased ability to assimilate new pieces of information from which the foundation of conceptual thinking is laid. They find enjoyment and fun in educational games and activities that involve grouping of things or objects into same or different categories, playing of roles, interacting with fellow children, building blocks and puzzles, and other types of activities that can develop his mental and social skills.
Educational games are commonly used in schools as a teaching tool for easier learning. The child learns to adjust and control his responses since rules are set for the games. He learns the value of sharing, courage, patience, and self control as he mingles with other children who may be far too different from him. With parents and teachers around to give proper assistance during games and plays, learning, growth, and development can surely be successfully attained.
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The Big Gap – Online Educational Games For Kids
In our quest to find online educational games and learning activities for kids in kindergarten, preschool and first grades, we did a detailed study to see how well they fulfill parental expectations and needs. Our findings show significant gaps, indicating challenges and new opportunities for online educational websites for kids.
What do parents actually want?
Earlier surveys have shown that parents generally want their children to get used to computers at a young age, but not get addicted to the same. Parents expect children’s websites to be informational, easy to use, and suitable for kids of varying ages. They look for games and activities that teach the kids the essential concepts of early childhood education, such as, numbers, alphabets, phonics, analytical skills etc. They also look for online stories, rhymes and other entertaining content. Studies have shown it to be highly effective, if the kids are taught in a subtle and entertaining manner, without giving them a burdened feeling that they need to learn. Such a fun learning approach goes a long way in addressing their short attention spans, and it is quite effective in motivating kids to learn.
Of course, in today’s scenario, most parents are busy and find little time to sit along with their kids in front of the computer on a regular basis. Educational websites for kids need to be well designed for easy kid-friendly usage, and have the ability to engage young kids without the parents necessarily having to babysit them all the time.
What do most educational web sites offer?
To our surprise, our research showed that most kids education web sites fail to meet the above, rather basic expectations. We found a large number of websites offering online educational games, activities and content in a highly unorganized manner without any standardization. Each site had its own content and navigational structure, requiring kids to read and understand instructions on the screen, making it mandatory for an adult to help and supervise. Typically, most games are not age specific and unintuitive in their design. Large number of games relied on kid’s hand-eye coordination, and did nothing in terms of helping them learn a new concept.
Even the more education-oriented websites, actually do not ‘teach’ or explain concepts to the kids. They pose questions in a game format that mainly ‘test’ what the kids already know. Teaching requires audio-visual content that explain the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of each topic in an age-specific manner. This is one of the biggest shortcomings of most of the web sites for early childhood education.
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Educational Toys for Baby
Everyone wants their child to become a doctor or engineer or s successful businessman. No doubt, every child has the potential but it needs to be churned. For this, one needs to build up interest of the child. Every child isn’t born a scholar. The grass root education matters a lot for child to gather pace to become something in life. How this starts? The answer is from your own home. There is no doubt that home can be called the first school of the child where a child learns everything. To make child acquainted with the things, the toys play an important role.
Educational toys always play an important role for letting the child to learn things. A child is blank and from the medium of toys he starts understanding things. In his early childhood, toys are his best friend as they keep surrounding him for most part of the day. So imparting education through educational toys is a novel idea. When a child is in early childhood, he grabs the things in fastest manner through play and there educational toys plays their role. Educational toys can make him learn new things and also provide fun and happiness to child as these are toys and a child loves to play with toys. Thus through educational toys a child can grab more rather than any other means.
Market is flooded with different types of educational toys but it is up to you to select which kind of toy for your preschooler child. To select educational toys you should have criteria to select them and following questions will help you to decide the criteria:
o Do you want to increase the imagination power of your child or need an educational toy?
o Is there some weakness in your child which you want to correct?
o What are the strengths of your child?
o Is the educational toy you are selecting for your child, meant for his age?
o Is the toy holds good reputation and holds plenty of good reviews that the toy will help your child in making his basics sound and clear?
o If other parents have used the same educational toy for their child, was it beneficial and seemed to work?
These are some questions which help you to make choice for educational toys for your child. You should forget that only educational toys are not meant to be bought for your child. For proper growth along with educational toys your child needs toys which are imaginative and should help in overcoming his weakness and making his strengths stronger. In other words, you need to have a balanced collection of electronic toys, educational toys and those toys which your child likes most like dolls, building blocks, and action icons. One must understand this thing that each child is different and it is not imperative that if one child loves educational toys, the other one also should have the same taste for educational toys and must should not force his/ her wishes on child at such a fancy age as it is the age where the child grows and the way he grows builds up the stage for his future.