Educational toys can aid your child’s development in myriad ways, from boosting cognitive and linguistic abilities to encouraging creativity and self-expression. With the market booming, parents spend hundreds of dollars to grant their kids an ethereal experience and guarantee they learn while having fun. However, you can make educational toys at home using a variety of methods, and the best part is: they can be just as useful as store-bought ones!
We round up our handpicked advice for making one-of-a-kind educational toys at home to ensure the best experience for your kid. Let’s dive right in!
Cardboard Shapes Puzzles
What if we told you that you could teach geometry to your kid by crafting a fun cardboard puzzle with everyday items you can find lying around your home? The whole physical universe is made up of shapes, lines, and spaces, so nurturing a feel for geometry from a young age is equally important as leveraging essay writing services online to skyrocket writing skills. So, prepare your cookie cutters and simple cardboard for this exciting challenge! Here’s what you’ll need.
Tools for creating a useful educational toy don’t get any easier than this! You’ll only need a few pieces of cardboard, bottle caps for knobs, scissors, geometric cookie cutters, and a glue stick. Draw precise geometric shapes to trace on your cardboard, then cut them out and attach plastic bottle cap knobs to each puzzle piece. Make sure your shapes fit the spaces perfectly!
Pretend Food Play
Playing pretend food games with friends is often associated with some of the most rewarding childhood memories. While playing this simple-to-set-up game, kids hone creative skills as they improvise a lot. Encouraging youngsters to pretend they’re chefs or that they’re visiting a chic restaurant can easily let their imagination run wild. Besides, since food has such a huge impact on our daily lives, you could use this opportunity to gradually teach your child to make healthy food choices. The benefits of pretend food games are endless!
Whether you make paper sandwiches or wooden cherries, you’re sure to provide hours of non-stop entertainment for your kid! And the best part is you not only benefit your kid but also foster your own creativity. You could make a delicious-looking pie out of colored paper, cotton wool, and foil. Or else, make healthy vegetables out of tape, glue, and tacks. The choice is all yours!
The options you can find online are not only extremely expensive but also frequently made of environmentally harmful plastic. Making your own toys at home allows you to save money while benefiting humanity as a whole.
An Alphabet Monster
A thorough knowledge of mathematics is indispensable for literally anything we do in life, so you should encourage your kid to fall in love with the subject from a young age. And what better way to do so than creating an alphabet monster out of a simple cereal box? Children will have to deal with demanding academic schedules as they get older, be it honing writing skills by writing academic papers for money or preparing for burdensome examinations. Developing a firm grasp of mathematics shall help them rise and shine in college life.
Print a monster template out of multifarious options available online. Glue the template on your cardboard and cut out a large enough speech bubble; tell your child that the monster is hungry, waiting for correctly-identified alphabet letters to eat. Then the real party begins! You can play a fun recognition game with your child, encouraging them to identify letters in order to satisfy the monster.
Painting Rocks
Little ones are sensory seekers. They rely on their various senses to help them feel and understand their surroundings. You could easily encourage your child’s writing abilities by painting alphabet letters on beautiful rocks, making them fall in love with the objects, and asking them to do the same. Plain white paper and a pencil rarely satisfy the curiosity of young children, so you should delve deeper. Opting for colorful rocks you can find on beaches and embellishing them with beautiful letter forms is a surefire way to spike your kid’s curiosity for writing!
What’s more, the more creative you get while educating your child, the more you’ll help their imagination in the future. Children who were taught using a variety of inventive games are often extremely creative in later life, easily crafting mesmerizing handmade products and reveling in a variety of artistic mediums. So make sure your educational toys and games are as creative as they can get!
Wrapping Up
By now, you should be a happy parent aware of the best practices for making top-notch educational toys for your kid. You don’t need to spend a fortune on educational toys that can easily be created without ever needing to leave the comfort of your home. Apart from helping you save money, the process of creating toys can prove an extremely rewarding experience in and of itself, allowing you to bond with your child and foster creative thinking. Oftentimes, the best things in life are free!
Make sure to try out our suggestions to integrate fun with learning and help your kid get all due education without stressing out. Best of luck!
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Ruby Butz is a high school student counselor and blogger. Drawing on her extensive knowledge of psychology, Ruby spends her days helping teenagers overcome mental problems. Every weekend, Ruby contributes educational blog posts on topics as varied as education, lifestyle, technology, and more.
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels
