Kids learn through the act of playing whether they are painting a picture or building a model plane or fort they are being made to work their cognitive, motor, language and social skills. Learning toys are a great way for children to develop their skills and abilities in a multi-sensory and creative manner.

Learning toys can enhance a child’s skills in many areas of development. While some may focus only on one area of development, others may help build multiple areas of development. The important part of a learning toy is that it does contribute to your child’s education and development in some way unlike most toys that are in the market which provide no benefit to your child.

When you are choosing toys and games make sure that they are classified as learning toys or educational toys and that they target one of these areas of development in some way.

Motor Development: Motor development has to do with your child’s use of their arms and legs. Motor development is divided into two categories, fine motor and gross motor development. Fine motor development has to do with the ability to use fingers and hands to manipulate objects and tools while gross motor skills require the use of arms and legs to perform activities such as walking, running, catching and object and other such activities. Learning toys such as arts and crafts, model building and outdoor games all help develop motor coordination and control. Any activity that requires a child to manipulate objects and coordinate their finger and hand movements or arm and leg movements will target motor development.

Cognitive Development: Learning toys that help build a child’s memory skills, reasoning skills, general knowledge skills and numerical skills all contribute to enhancing a child’s cognition. These kind of learning toys are wonderful to use as supplements to your child’s school curriculum to make learning more multi-sensory and fun. Learning toys such as board games, memory games, strategy games, puzzles and math games are all great ways for children to learn in a manner that is interactive and pleasant. Even arts and craft games will help cognition, especially learning toys like paint by number sets or model building sets.

Language Development: Most learning toys have the potential to enhance a child’s language skills. Any leaning toy that encourages children to explore language through vocabulary building or encourages conversational skill development will be beneficial. Toys and games such as board games that encourage players to interact and converse with each other are great ways to develop language skills. Learning toys such as general knowledge games that introduce children to new words and topics are also great at developing language.

If you focus on finding learning toys which are targeted to help your child build these developmental skills mentioned above you will find that you child will be greatly benefitted. Any toy that you choose for your child should not only be fun but should always help your child learn something.