Guidance to Choose the Right Toys for Pre-schoolers
In earlier articles, we laid the foundation of the importance of inspiring kids’ creativity, to maximize the outcomes of their growing age towards an outstanding career journey. In our analysis, we showed how STEM is playing a fundamental role in all life aspects. To ease analysis and guide parents, we split the growing age into three stages, namely, Toddler, Pre-schooler, and Mid-childhood.
Starting with Toddler, we showed the basic skills and goals that needed to understand for choosing the right toys that basically play a considerable role of building the awareness of the physics of the surroundings, like sizes and colors.
In this article, we would like to briefly summarize the major goals of each stage from Toddler through Mid-childhood years. From the perspective of a growing process, raising a kid is somehow like creating a brand and growing it bigger, better, and stronger gradually with the right ways. Similar to the brand growing evolution process, there are 3 major stages to highlight in sequence to match the psychology of our precious kids:
- First (Toddler) Stage: Awareness
- Second (Pre-schooler) Stage: Interest
- Third (Mid-childhood) Stage: Desire
Every single stage matters, and each step connects with another.
First (Toddler) Stage: Awareness
At the Toddlers’ stage, having mapped up the essential STEM skills, awareness is the process of realization indeed. Awareness of physics skills and realization of its elements are the key here; for example, colors, graphics, images, sounds, forces, and relative sizing. This will inspire random creation and imagination, and lay the foundation of Math skills, like numbers, counting, addition, subtraction, and sorting objects.
How to Sparkle Up Pre-schoolers’ Interests in STEM?
Now, let’s dig into the most important stage for kids - Pre-schooler. This stage is the bridge that connects Toddlers’ life with big kids’ life. It is the golden time for parents to really build kids’ interest in some areas and shape their future, which is indeed the period that should not be neglected. Let’s now break down the skills for Pre-schoolers according to the core STEM skills map:
- Curiosity
- Beginning of creativity
- Ability to solve certain needs
- Solving ability with
- Creativity
- Ability to combine objects
- Independent thinking
One important thing that parents should know is - kids are digital natives. For this reason, they are random access learners with a strong sense of instant gratification. Being influenced by their living environments, they are good communicators. However, electronics distractions, fewer sports, limited teamwork, and little hands-on explorations have become common among kids in the digital era.
In this case, the major goal is to sparkle up the interest in STEM and make them stay focused and creative so that they can catch up with the next stage. To change this situation, how to navigate screen time and device distractions and lead them back to the right track would be the priority for parents. That’s one of the reasons why choosing toys has become one of the most critical topics for kids’ education and development.
Showing being proud of them is also very encouraging to develop kids’ interest. The more we encourage our kids to build, the more curious they would become, and the more interests they will have in something of their own – scalable toys; the best companions to them.
How to Better Prepare Pre-schooler for Mid-childhood Years?
Similarly, understanding and defining the goals is always the first step to select toys for Pre-schoolers. During the period of Pre-schooler to Mid-Childhood years, the scalable toys will inspire them to develop something random and make them more interested in building up more and more. While scaling up the toys, they will start to pick up some core STEM skills. This is the last and very decisive step in kids’ life about their desired career goals. Curiosity and interest lead to the desire of trying, thinking, and building. Desire drives creation and innovation.
As a result, every single step matters, and each step connects with another. And there’s a small action all parents can take to strengthen these skills, such as repurposing STEM toys that they have to encourage kids to create something random with their imagination.
Stay tuned on our article that will show more about how to evolve kids’ growth on continuing in the STEM career, and about this inflection point in our future great men and women for the society.
In conclusion, Pre-schooler is the golden age to build up their interest in STEM and a bridge from Toddler through School life. It is the only period that you get a chance to build the interest and prepare for more in the Desire Phase of being a kid. If we don’t do it at the right time, it’s going to be very difficult to leverage this important growing period of a child.
To seize the best moment to sparkle up Mid-children’s interest in STEM Education with the right toys, explore more here.