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Educational toys are fun for babies and provide another tool to stimulate learning and brain development in your infant. There are many ways to teach a child and tens of thousands of educational toys on the market to help parents in the endeavor. The challenge for parents, child care providers and educators is to choose from the vast array of educational toys available in a way that creates a balance of learning techniques, is age appropriate, and most of all fun. This article will provide basic facts about; how babies learn, types of educational toys available and examples of each.
How Babies Learn
It is quite surprising the rate at which babies learn and develop. Learning begins in the womb and continues throughout childhood. In early life how a child learns centers largely around the relationship with the parents. At least until the child starts preschool, the job of stimulating and satisfying baby's desire to learn falls primarily to the parents.
While babies respond to their parent's voice there are many other sounds they find interesting. When parents are choosing educational toys for babies they should look for toys that have sound, colors that are bright and contrasted like red, black and white, and have interesting textures that babies like to touch.
Sounds
Babies' respond to sound and some of the best educational toys include rattles and musical toys. Soothing music such as lullabies is usually best. Auditory and musical toys are known to stimulate logical thinking and imagery in babies and in adults for that matter.
One good educational auditory toy is the Electronic Metal Keys. These keys are good for a child 6 months and up. The Electronic Metal Keys are an imitation of the parent's car keys. However, the Electronic Metal Key toy is safe for the child to chew on and has a push button that emits sounds like a car horn, doorbell, ignition, and remote control door.
Sight
Bright colors in educational toys stimulate baby's vision. Look for toys with strong color contrast and patterns. A good one to look for is a colorful crib mobile that emits music, has different textures, curves and symmetry.
One such educational toy is the Bath Time Fishing toy. This item is appropriate for babies 12 months and up. It's a great prop to use during a baby bath. Making the bath as fun as possible can also help overcome any resistance or fear your child may have during the bathing process. The toy is bright in color, has a rod and reel, and the strong magnets attached to its tails allow for easy catching. Bath Time Fishing is priced at around $16.00 dollars.
Fine motor play
Fine motor play educational toys are used to stimulate coordination in baby's finger and eye movements. One such toy aimed at developing the hand-eye coordination is 'Counting Pals', which is aimed at babies 6 months and up. Counting Pals are 10 soft and squishy colored blocks. They can be stacked, tossed, chewed by the baby. Counting pals also provides animal illustrations that will enchant the baby. Counting Pals educational toy is priced at around $12.00.
Cognitive Skills
There are some educational toys that promote cognitive skills in babies, which is to say they stimulate the child's memory, how they picture things and their problem solving skills. Educational toys like building blocks, activity boxes or puzzles are a good purchase for your child. The puzzles can deal with numbers, letters or pictures; it does not matter, but they should be fairly easy for a baby to grasp and manipulate.
August 2005 - Sydney , Australia . Sydney mothers have discovered a way of providing their children with high quality children's educational toys and they're only paying 20% of store price. These mothers aren't spending hours in discount stores or second hand toy stores. They're buying high quality, highly sought after children's educational toys and instead of paying $100 they're paying only $20. They've organized themselves in groups of 5 or 6 and each mother is buying a toy worth $100. These toys are then circulated within the group so that the group has toys to the value of $500 - $600 and each child has a one month turn with the toy before passing it on to the next family.
Ute Fumeaux, CEO and founder of is a mother of 3 who empathies with the thousands of mothers who find it tough finding the extra cash for those high quality children's educational toys on the market.
But then, Ute came up with a great idea, one that to date has probably saved her 100's of dollars................In fact this idea has saved 4 of her friends 100's of dollars. It was such a simple idea, that when Ute shared it with 4 friends in her mother's group, they laughed. It just seemed too simple not to be something that everyone did.
The idea?
Toy Sharing
Hang on let's clarify. 5 mothers of boys and girls of similar ages got together - had a look both on-line and at the multitude of toy catalogues in the mail box. They each chose $100 worth of high quality (relatively unisex) children's educational toys.
They then set up a share system or toy library system with the toys. Each family had 1 month turns of each of the toys. At the end of each month the toys were rotated within the group.
Now let's have a look at what this meant firstly for the children:
And then of course from the parents perspective:
This process may seem simple but we all know there are 1000's of families feeling the pinch who still like to be able to provide high quality children's educational toys for their children. Well why not try Ute's idea and save yourself 100's of dollars and be able to give your children their toys?