The Secrets to Raising a Smarter Child
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Choosing the best educational toys for your kid - Tips and Suggestions

By Andrew Loh

Is choosing and selecting the right type of educational toys a big task and a difficult work? Are you planning to buy a set of toys that work to improve, develop and enhance your child's overall development? As a parent, you must realize the critical importance of educational toys in the life of your child. Right type of toys will not only provide hours of non-stop fun, but also help your child develop a series of beneficial developmental characters and traits. In fact, toys are your kid's best friends.

There isn't a kid in the world who does not like toys. Kid's and grown up children's toys have been here for thousands of years. They can range from very simple dolls to present day's mechanized and automated whizz-kid type of toys that can cost hundreds of dollars. Choosing the right type of toys could provide a big fillip to your kid in developing his or her personality.

Here are some simple tips and practical suggestions for choosing the right type of toys for your kid:

• Let the toys be simple, be fun to play and safe for day-to-day use. Most of the toys available in the market are real fun, but they are not really safe for use. Some of the toys that you buy may contain toxic and dangerous materials like pants, while a number of other may have movable parts that are loose and sharp. In practice, educational toys that you buy for your kid must be positive in developing child's growth and development.

• The main goal of choosing an educational toy is to provide hours of fun time and relaxation. These toys should be simple enough for an easy and straight forward use.

• Educational toys can enhance a series of skills like cognitive skills, motor skills, thinking and reasoning skills and mind-muscle coordination. For a growing baby, all these traits and attributes are mandatory and essential to ensure complete growth.

• You may wish to choose educational toys based on the kid's age. Children up to three or four years are keen learners and they learning a range of skills for the first time in their life. These kills could be developing coordination, analytical thinking and creativity.

• It is better to buy toys based in the likes and dislikes of your child. Each child has a special preference for a particular type of toy. Girls may have special preference to certain type of toys while boys will like to play with those toys are adventurous and creative in nature.

• It is well proven fact that almost all children like to play with a series of musical instruments from the traditional and age old classic nursery rhymes to modern and classical music.

• Most of the children also like to play with educational toys that cajole them to draw, paint, and write some diagrams or figures or even patterns. These toys can help your kid learn artistic and imaginative skills.

• As your kid enters preschool and kindergarten stages, his or her teachers can help you with choosing toys that satisfy his or her current developmental level and chronological and mental age.

• In summary, you may wish to look for toys at or slightly above your child's perceived skill level. It is very critical for him or her to play with toys that he or she can successfully play and indulge, with as well as those toys that pose challenges to him or her. Challenge while playing should preferably be fun, thrill, cajoling and stimulating; not frustrating or disappointing.

Here are some of the best known educational toys that you consider for your child:

1. The visual and mental perception of infants and toddlers is quite restricted or limited, so ensure that you are buying toys in bright, vivid, attractive and contrasting colors.

2. Activity and play centers and crib based toys can mesmerize newborns and toddlers. These toys can stimulate your kid's visual, eye-mind coordination as well as provide an opportunity to develop basic motor activities.

3. Babies and infants up to six months of age possess very limited motor or cognitive skills and they always love high-pitched and musical sounds. Chimes, light musical instruments, rattles, teething sound making rings, colorful pictures and patterns and soft moving blocks can help your kid develop a series of beneficial traits.

4. For babies and toddlers between six to nine months of age, you can think of buying colorful building blocks, multi-activity boxes and basic cubes, colored stacking rings and bathing toys. Slow introduce highly textured toys to provide variety.

5. Between the age of nine months and a year, your kid is old and agile enough to play, enjoy, understand, imbibe and learn from different toys like nesting cups, stacking cones, push and pull toys, large crayons, drawing boards, musical instruments, buckets, garden instruments, spades, and stacking blocks.

6. You may need to buy highly fancy and expensive toys for your kid. Just ensure that you are buying something that is easy to play, helpful, beneficial, meaningful and right enough to keep engaged in developing a series of developmental milestones.

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