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We’ve developed our range of educational toys with the challenges of a shoestring budget and the 21st Century in mind. Here are 5 tips to help choose your next set of learning aids so you get the best bang for your buck
Tip 1 : Prepare the ground — Invest in learning aids that develop mindfulness
Sometimes the most effective thing you can do to cultivate a learning environment is to invest time and money into routines and learning aids that perfectly prepare your students to meet the demands of any curriculum that comes their way. Mindful Kids is one such tool: it helps you facilitate 36 different activities that develop self-awareness while catering to all 7 learning styles. Spending just 20-minutes per day on an exercise will develop each child’s concentration, empathy, and resilience to a point where they’ll be able to work together as a team, laying the groundwork for an atmosphere perfectly focused on learning.
Tip 2: Select games that encourage imagination and teamwork
An Interactive and imaginative play is vital for healthy development. It’s also a foolproof way to develop the 4 Cs. Through dedicated play time, facilitated by educational toys and games, kids naturally develop creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration.
Follow the Big Foot takes your class on an imaginative adventure to find the big foot that you’ve hidden somewhere around the playground or classroom. This is a great way to cultivate a sense of exploration and to gamify elements of the curriculum. You could easily hide treats along the course to be found by solving curriculum-related clues!
Tip 3: Build a collection that works together
Imagine creating a different experience every day for an entire year with just a handful of key purchases? Like with watches and phones, single-function devices are no longer necessary — it’s more important to consider how things work together and to compile an efficient toolkit that performs most of the functions that you need. The same philosophy can work in your classroom, especially if you’re on a budget!
Our catalog is the perfect aid on this mission. For example, investing in the Mindful Kids program, along with Follow the Big Foot prepares the ground for a class dynamic that makes Dictate & Shape especially successful. Cultivating mindfulness and teamwork is the perfect preparation for any kind of learning to take place, especially for the skills development that this game focuses on building: active listening and nonverbal communication. It can also seamlessly segue with your math curriculum, because the games center on building mosaics and geometric forms!
Tip 4: Focus on expanded and multiple literacies
It’s so easy to deliver a reductionist curriculum that focuses on content to the exclusion of context. However, as ECD teachers, you’re tasked with more than just developing numeracy and verbal literacy. For instance, managing emotions is a learned skill that can be developed holistically as a part of the daily curriculum, and helps ensure you cultivate a classroom dynamic in which your students’ internal landscape never gets in the way of their work. In this way, and much like with Mindful Kids builds mental clarity, you can cultivate emotional resilience with learning aids like BBQ Emotions! that allows curriculum content to be better received when the time comes.
Tip 5: Choose aids that gamify essential content
Learning to read and write remains one of the essential ways you can prepare your kids for global citizenship. While they may be focused on learning one particular language, the skills behind successful language acquisition stand them in good stead regardless of where they are. When they’re faced with any situation in which they need to decode written or verbal meaning, it pays to have a couple of languages already under your belt. The process of learning any language though, needn’t be dry and tiring. With games like ABC Monster, you could easily gamify this learning curve in a way that keeps even the most distracted child engaged.
Dive into our catalog and explore our philosophy and product range further. You’ll be well set to select the best combination of educational toys and learning aids to meet the particular needs of your classroom and give your students the best start in life.