Toys And Games

Kids love playing dress-up. It helps stimulate their imagination and it can be incredibly educational as well. Whether they are pretending to be a nurse, a fireman or a teacher, emulating someone they look up to teaches children a great deal about respect. If your child is fond of pretending to be the teacher to his or her friends, why not purchase a chalk board for the home? They’ll love the idea of being able to give their lessons on it, and you’ll find a lot of good use for it once they outgrow it as well.

Home improvement stores seem to stock everything under the sun. This is true when it comes to chalk boards as well. You can typically find a selection of different size boards to choose from at almost any home improvement store. You’ll need to decide whether you prefer a green or black board and also the size that would fit best in the space you have. You certainly aren’t going to want to bring home a standard classroom size chalk board as most homes simply have no place to hang something this large.

If you are going to place it in the child’s room for now, choose one that is smaller. Kids won’t mind having less room to write, they’ll just be thrilled by the prospect of teaching other kids and even their dolls their pretend lesson plans. A chalk board should be hung on studs to ensure it’s placed securely on the wall. You may choose to hang it at whatever height best suits your child, which makes it much easier for them to write on it.

In some areas you may be able to find a can of paint that actually works to transform your existing painted wall into a chalk board. This is ideal for families that don’t want the added worry of the heavy board falling off the wall, or they simply aren’t comfortable making holes for the board. Instead a spot on the wall is taped off, and the paint applied. It dries in either a green or black color and creates a very smooth writing surface. It’s a great idea to mount moulding around the board to reflect the way traditional chalk boards look. Also a small shelf to hold the chalk and the eraser brush is essential so the child doesn’t misplace them.

Once it’s all setup your junior teacher will be ready to call the class to order. He or she will spend many hours writing on the board and you can even get involved by helping them learn to write the alphabet or do simple math equations. Chalk boards are learning tools and however the child utilizes it, whether they are the teacher or the student, they are sure to enjoy it.

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For children, work is play. Even as adults, we learn more when we are engaged in something in a fun and playful way. Learning isn’t meant to be serious. It is meant to be lighthearted and fun. After all, the more you enjoy something, the better you do with it. That is the thought behind science toys. A good science experiment toy can really get a kid excited about science like nothing else can.

Science toys come in all shapes and sizes. Basically, anything that kids use to interact with science in a playful way can be consider a science toy. One of my favorite science toys when I was a kid was a slinky. It is amazing how many principles of science it can be used to demonstrate. Although it is quite a simple science toy, it is very versatile. One of the most important things that they can use it for is demonstrating wave motion. By shaking a spring of any sort up and down, you can see how waves propagate through a medium. With a slinky, the demonstration is quite visual. Although theoretically you can use a jump rope, having something elastic works a lot better.

Of course, science toys don’t just come in kits for older kids. There are other toys that help teach principles of science and mechanics as well. You don’t think about it as science when you’re at that age, but it is. For example, when I was about five years old I had a Capsella kit. With these science toys, I would get to connect gears to create working motorized vehicles. Although it would have been rather simple for an older kid, for a younger kid it demonstrated some pretty complex principles of engineering.

When I got older, I had an electronic projects kit. Of all the science toys I have ever owned, I think it might have been the best. Basically, it was a big box with a couple hundred components mounted on it. Each of them had springs where you could attach wires easily from one component to another. You could build about 200 different projects, and each project would illustrate something about electronics. Through it, I got to understand how circuits work. It taught me about oscillators, logic gates, resistance, capacitance, and many other fairly advanced concepts. As a matter of fact, it was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with electronic engineering. If I hadn’t been able to play with it, I might not have discovered one of my greatest interests.

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