A slightly more serious topic as the title suggests. I was looking for articles to share on this blog when I found this self-titled series on the ‘Games For Educators’ website. The author, Phil Wrzesinski, discusses how important all toys are for teaching our children the life lessons that we would like them to carry into adulthood.
As parents, we jump at the chance to buy items tagged as ‘educational’, or ‘learning’…..and there are even brands dedicated to supplying us with toy after toy solely for the purpose of boosting the brain power of our little geniuses.
The ‘How Toys Teach’ articles made me stop and think for a moment though about how everything I give my son is teaching him something – it just might not be something I want him to learn!
The important life lessons identified by Phil Wrzesinski fall into the following categories:
Communication
Cooperation
Problem Solving
Planning & Strategy
Logical Thinking
Cause & Effect
He points out that great toys in some way provide experiences that positively influence your child’s store these life lessons to make them more fulfilled and robust.
I was pleased to discover, and am very proud to say that (in my opinion) Do-N-Slide provides ways to achieve positive experiences in at least 3 of these categories. It reinforces my belief that this product can help many families.
For the time being at least, I’ll give an extra few seconds of thought to the latest Ben 10 figure my son is lobbying for, and weigh the lessons he might be learning from it against the desire he has to have the ‘latest’ thing. I’m not saying I wont buy it anyway, but I’ll at least look beyond the plastic to how we can play and imagine our way into adding to his store of life lessons!
If you’d like to read the entire articles written by Phil Wrzesinski, you can find them here http://www.toyhouseonline.com/teach.html.