Have Fun Teaching Your Children with Lego Sets and Board Games
Special things can happen with children and their toys. As a child, I can’t remember a girl who didn’t own a Barbie or a boy who didn’t run around the backyard wielding action figures with whom he was going to save the world. Knex building sets were scattered all over the floors of every playroom I entered as a youth, including my own. We could invent amazing things with those scale model sets; towering buildings for our Barbie doll or stuffed toys to live in, a store for them to shop in; the things we could create was only limited by our imaginations. While toys like these don’t perfectly fit into the category of educational toys, they can teach valuable lessons.
Toys of all shapes and sizes and genres are important to children, even those that parents may not first think of as educational toys. This is as true today as it was 30 years ago when I sat playing classic board games with my sister. Youngsters learn a lot of things by playing, and they expand their imaginations and their critical thinking skills. While parents may think that only learning games are able to to teach a child anything, that would be a mistake. In essence, most toys are educational games when you realize that a child learns from playing freely.
Classic board games, while providing lots of entertainment, also work on developing a child’s analytical skills as well as coping skills. Everyone doesn’t win when we play classic board games, and at times losing at something is an important lesson for a child to learn as emerging victorious is. When a child wins or loses in a board game, one player is humbled while the other, hopefully, learns to be a corteous winner. With the assistance of an attentive parent, children will develop these skills. So popular are certain board games that they are being created in ways that they can be played in the car. Travel games may not be as stimulating as the original board games, but it sure keeps a child engaged during the trip!
For many decades, parents and children have spent hours building their relationships over LEGO sets. The magnificently colorful blocks in a Lego set bring out the very best in a child’s imagination, and keep them occupied for days. A wonderful thing about LEGO sets is that just one set could produce lots of different items, from a dinosaur to a village. Over the years, Lego sets have grown to where there are now sets specifically for girls, such as the Belville line. Of course, boys love Lego sets like Bionicles or Star Wars. But every child can learn deftness and originality through Lego sets, and that’s what really matters.
Need more proof of the value of Lego sets as an educational toy? Studies show that children develop new brain connections when working with LEGO sets. By merely playing with their Lego set, children also learn spatial concepts, cause-and-effect, and fine motor skills. There’s no better way to learn!
