Phonics Tiles

Jacks. Hopscotch. Dominoes. Everyone knows how to play these simple games, but did you know that even games like these can teach math and enhance hand-eye coordination and motor skills? Enter the new breed of interactive learning games designed to stimulate the way a child learns at every stage of development.

“By giving a child a three-dimensional interactive learning game, you are incorporating the primary levels of learning: tactile, visual, auditory, and neurological,” says Kathleen Halloran, a retired educator of 34 years. “It is this unique combination of elements that enhance a child’s developing mind.”

iQuest

Companies like Neurosmith and LeapFrog design their products based on child development studies showing that infants and toddlers learn best when they are fully engaged—touching, moving, listening, and exploring. Incorporating the power and technology of a computer with music and language, both companies’ toys create a hands-on, multi-sensory experience that enhances a child’s reading, math, fine motor and creative skills.

Music and reading both rely on the ability to discriminate pitch and distinguish between sounds, and Educators at Hopkins’ Peabody Conservatory of Music believe that there is also a relationship between tempo and what students later encounter in fractions and basic math.

Turbo Twist Math

Turbo Twist Math by LeapFrog ($29.99) incorporates music, fun games and sounds to teach children math basics such as fractions, decimals, percentiles, beginning Algebra, and word problems. Covering over 170,000 questions based on more than 250 real textbooks, the company’s iQuest ($59.99) helps children study for tests and SATs.

Neurosmith’s Music Blocks Maestro

Neurosmith’s Music Blocks Maestro ($59.95) enables children to compose more than one million unique musical compositions simply by mixing and matching five brightly colored blocks, while their Phonics Tiles ($89.95) incorporates four modes of play to help children explore letter names and sounds, build and decode words and spell the 600 most common words taught in pre-school through the first grade.

Baby Einstein DVD series

The Baby Einstein DVD series (ToyDirectory) ($19.98 - $74.98) are a fun multi-sensory learning resource that allows parents to interact with their children through music, sound and engaging visuals. There’s even a series that introduces children to the sound of English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and the Hebrew language. Discovery Cards offer a fun and playful way for children to identify and label images while exposing them to a variety of vocabulary words.

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