Developmental Benefits

At MyToysAndBooks.com, we use 10 basic developmental benefits to help you choose toys and games that suit your children’s learning styles and to address any skills that you wish to help develop and strengthen in your children. All the products sold at MyToysAndBooks.com online store will address at least one of these developmental skills if not more. Look out for these learning icons and let them guide you in making the right choice!

  Gross motor skill  

These toys encourage movements of the large muscles of the body for crawling, sitting, walking, running, climbing, skipping, jumping, throwing, catching, etc. Children who are provided with plenty of opportunities to explore what their bodies can do will be able to demonstrate increasing agility, balance, control, strength, coordination, flexibility, and develop great spatial awareness.

For example, babies express their feelings through bodily movements and it is crucial to encourage head movements, kicking, stretching and patting through the provision of suitable stimulating toys such as play gym and mobiles.

 Fine Motor Skill 

These toys encourage smaller scale movements such as grasping, transferring, clapping, building, drawing, scribbling, mark-making, threading, pouring and other small precise movements.

Children should be provided with rich variety of opportunities to develop this skill which is vital for writing at a later stage.

In order to improve their hand eye coordination and manipulation, children should have plenty of  practices with suitable toys such as construction sets, puzzles, stacking toys, brushes, clay, dressing up toys, lacing activities, etc.

 Personal and emotional skill 

These toys provide the experiences to enable the children to develop a positive sense of themselves, i.e. strong sense of self confidence, self esteem and self-motivation. Through playing with appropriate toys, children can develop positive emotional well-being, knowing who they are, where they fit in and feeling good about themselves.

Toys which allow children to be curious, enthusiastic, engaged and practise ways of solving problems will help them to gain confidence in themselves and to feel capable of responding to self-chosen challenges. As a result of this, a positive disposition to learn will grow from these experiences and motivate children to learn and carry on learning.

 Social skill 

These toys provide the opportunity for children to form positive relationships with adults and peers. By playing with toys that promote turn-taking, communication, co-operation, negotiating and sharing of ideas and goals, children will learn about group dynamics and learn how to understand and work collaboratively with others.

Card games, board games and imaginative (pretend) plays involving 2 or more children will give them plenty of opportunities to practise taking turns, listening to each other and agreeing on group values and codes of behaviour.

 Logical Thinking 

These toys encourage your children to solve problems and challenges for themselves through the use of logical and strategic thinking.

Children are natural problem solver from the moment they are born and it is therefore important that we continue to train and encourage them through stimulating plays. Use of engaging toys such as play gym, puzzles, board games and construction sets will enable the children to build concepts and hypothesis while making sense and order out of the experiences that they have. Concept formation through manipulative play is central to children’s ability to think, reason and solve problems and make connections with the world.

 Creativity 

These toys allow children to use their imagination and express themselves in a creative manner. This area of learning includes art, music, dance, role play and imaginative play. Children are allowed the chance to explore colour, texture, sound, shape form and space in two or three dimensions.

To give your children the best opportunity for effective creative development, it is important to provide them with toys and tools where creativity and expressiveness are valued. In this way, children are able to communicate their ideas, thoughts and feelings, make connections and innovate through constant exploration and experimentation.

 Language & Literacy 

This area of learning involves speaking and listening in different situations, being read a wide range of books and reading simple texts and writing for a variety of purposes.

Looking at picture books, hearing stories, playing with interactive books and talking about daily experiences all contribute to language and literacy development in children. In addition, rehearsing pretend play and playing dressing up will all provide experiences to talk about and allow children to express themselves in words, hence encourage language development.

Toys that encourage the recognition of shapes (e.g. shape sorter) and sounds (e.g. rhyming puzzles) too are excellent pre-requisites to reading and writing.

 Discover the World 

These toys encourage children to find out more and make sense of the world they live in. This later forms the foundation for later learning in science, geography, history and information technology.

Children are given first-hand experiences to investigate, be curious, be enthusiastic, experiment, solve problems and pose questions about the world around them.  They are encouraged to observe and identify features of their environment, including the people, animals, buildings, plants, materials, natural resources, cultures and beliefs.

 Mathematics 

This area of learning includes counting, sorting, matching, seeking patterns, making connections, recognising relationships and working with numbers, shapes, space, time and measurements.

Children learn best when a subject has real meaning for them. In mathematics, this means doing a lot of concrete and practical works involving exploration and experimentation. Children tend to develop a better understanding for mathematics through stories, songs, games, toys and imaginative plays that draw out mathematical concepts in a fun way. Toys which involve pairing such as hammer board and posting boxes can give very young children a practical introduction to one-to-one correspondence. Shape sorters, construction kits, puzzles and play dough are toys which create an awareness of shape and space in children while lacing, threading and music-related exercises will help enhance pattern recognition in children.

 Develop the Senses 

These are toys that children can respond to by listening, looking, touching and smelling.

During the early years, babies and young children interact with their world through their senses. It is through this multi-sensory involvement with their surroundings that they learn and develop.

Babies are attracted to patterned (e.g. stripes) and brightly coloured objects and rhythmic sounds with different volume, tones and pitch around them. Toys that encourage responds from these senses will help the children to develop cognitively.