Good Old Fashioned Imagination

Legos, Tinker Toys,Linkin Logs,good old building blocks. What do all these toys have in common? Well, for one thing they all require imagination. They don't put themselves together so your child will have to and in the process use and develop fine motor skills and eye/hand coordination. That is what these toys have in common; they all foster and help develop imagination, fine motor skills and eye/hand coordination. Your child will need all three of these skills in order to have a successful learning experience. Success being the fact that they learn and not just a measurement of how much they learn. It is my belief that all children can learn. Period. The difference will be in the measurement of said learning.

One of the main things that these types of toys do is to encourage a child to use their imagination. I think that parents and yes, some teachers, sometimes fail to see the importance of imagination in a child's play. I believe that too much play with high tech games and computerized toys might even serve to dull a child's imagination. A well rounded and easily accessed imagination is needed in order to learn to read well or to do those word problems in math that we all seem to loathe. Ask an architect or a bridge engineer if he or she imaged a project before they began work on it. My bet is the answer will be a resounding of course! Medicine, architecture, agriculture, engineering. All these fields require an imagination.

Well developed fine motor skills will also be required in order for your child to learn to hold a pencil (and to learn to write) brush their teeth, comb their hair, button their shirt or tie their shoes. A surgeon without well developed fine motor skills would not be a good thing. Fine motor skills are important. Eye/hand coordination also falls in with fine motor skills. In order to move a pencil across a page to write your name you have to be able to coordinate those movements. A child is not born with all these neuro pathways already buzzing and ready for action, they have to be honed and nurtured and developed to their full capacity.

So, lets lay off the computerized dogs that flash creepy red lights for eyes and battery operated remote control cars, although the joy stick would be good for fine motor skills, and give our children more opportunity to use and develop those pathways in the brain just itching for something to do.