You’re Never Too Young to Learn:
Interactive Learning Games Help a Child’s Development
By Tamara Schuit
June 2003
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.
To view recent industry sales figures for Games and Puzzles, Click
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