woodmam school Kolkata knows that learning through play is an important part of a child's development. Educational games contribute to the child's good intellectual, social, and motor development and allow the little one to discover the world in which he lives. Toys, games, and puzzles include a wide range of materials that the child can explore, build and create.
At woodmam Kolkata, educational toys and games are used as a means of education, especially for young children, pre-schoolers, and schoolchildren. Play is a way for the child to get in touch with the world in which he lives, get acquainted with the world of “big people” and learn to adapt and communicate. From ancient times philosophers and then psychologists recommended the use of the game as a means of education, especially for the little ones. With the evolution of societies, the need to develop mental aspects has increased, so that parents and specialists in the field of education have become increasingly concerned with current ways to develop logic, creativity, imagination, will, attention, communication, etc..
Because it serves a recreational purpose and pursues pleasure, the toy easily captivates children and arouses their curiosity, making the game easier to assimilate tasks and rules. From simple toys, in the form of people, animals, or objects, to the creation of specific toys, which are addressed to children from infancy. B.D. Memorial, the best English medium school in Kolkata, uses educational toys to help develop: motor skills, attention, coordination, dexterity, cognitive skills, creativity, memory, imagination, vocabulary and speech, communication, and socialization.
Types of educational toys used by woodmam school Kolkata and their roles
Sensory educational toys, help the child, especially in the first year of life, to get in touch with the environment and to assimilate reality: books or sensory boards, toys in various geometric shapes made of wood or textile materials, activity balls, rattles, educational cubes or boxes, kaleidoscope.
Exercise-type educational toys stimulate the brain's activity of memory and learning through repetition and are based on the pleasure that the child has when playing, thus adapting and developing being accompanied by joy: shape sorters, tablets, cubes, and other interactive toys, building kits, creative sets for making objects, puzzle, maze toys, Rubik's cube.
Symbolic educational toys introduce children to the world of thinking and help them to mentally represent objects that cannot yet be perceived, in other words, they help them to build mental images, to gradually form their adult thinking. Toys and games that stimulate this aspect are especially useful after the child has started school, as support in accumulating and understanding information: magnetic boards, math scales, colouring books or various exercises, musical toys, educational games about the human body, the solar system, an animal farm, car circuits.
Educational games with rules serve children for socializing and communication and are recommended after the age of three. This category includes most games that are played in two or more, target type, number games, number games, dominoes.
Educational construction games are based on symbolic games and make the transition from the period when the child operates with symbols to the period of abstract operations. These games develop intelligence, creativity, and structured thought processes.
The benefits of educational toys
• development of motor coordination (the child learns to use his hands to explore the world and to develop his level of perception and representation of the activities he carries out)
• development of cognitive skills (stimulating the child to explore and experiment helps him to build his first processes of cognitive thinking such as understanding the cause-effect relationship and how certain situations can be resolved).
At B.D. Memorial, the best English medium school in Kolkata, a child can explore and discover everything around him, more precisely from stimuli that appear in various shapes and colours. In the moments of maximum receptivity, the child learns to recognize, identify and memorize everything, these being the skills of major importance that help him to evolve in life. The knowledge gained from observation and experimentation allows the brain to develop, thus still producing neurons and synapses (the region of communication between neurons). A child who plays and experiments becomes more aware of reality and as a result the structure of his brain changes.
In the first years of life, all the activities that the child carries out, especially those that involve games, help him to develop his cognitive skills, motor skills and contribute to language formation. The learning process must not stop, regardless of the child's age.
To maintain active neural connections, the child must have various experiences, because at his age the learning process is based on practice and not on theory. Thus, in this learning process at woodmam Kolkata there are 3 essential parts:
The cause-effect relationship - Children subconsciously ask, "What if ...?" The moment they begin to interact with the outside world, the cause-and-effect relationship is the first thing they encounter and guide their actions. When they make a construction from various overlapping objects and then tear it down to rebuild another, the little ones begin to perceive the causal link between the action and the result. Thus, I understand that any interaction with an object produces an effect.
Build-Destroy-Rebuild - objects can have different shapes, sizes, and weights, so the child can compare them, overlap them or put them in each other. But to discover these possibilities, the little one must have a series of experiences through which to understand that his actions create his reality. This way you can easily get through the difficult situations that arise.
Sort-Match-Handle - children develop manual coordination and motor skills by touching, grasping, and handling objects with various tactile surfaces.