The Elements of Toys Selection for Toddlers

When selecting a toy for your kids, what would you consider before adding it to your shopping cart? Besides toy safety, would you take into consideration skills and talents cultivation, development of future education as well as career opportunities? If you are interested in exploring more behind this, our recent article about STEM would answer these questions.

Given the facts about STEM education, it's not too much to say that toys related to STEM curriculum are must-haves in every family from now on. However, STEM toys selection can be a headache to some of the parents in terms of choosing, babysitting, as well as home education. Having mentioned earlier, getting to know our kids' personality is the first step to raise and educate them properly.

Here is the fundamental question: how should we choose STEM toys with the right product features for different age levels to reach different goals?

Let's start with Toddlers.How would STEM-related toys help them to develop skills in different STEM disciplines, and how would they influence their career development in the STEM areas?

Understanding the goals of each stage is the most convincing process with regard to children's health, behavior, and growth, during the sensitive periods from Toddler through Mid-child years. Curiosity is the nature of every kid during the journey. To adapt to the fast-changing digital time, personalization-focused education, for enhancing kids' strengths, understanding their needs and interests, has given us more confidence to believe that a Toy-to-Kid personalized object identification and differentiation are key elements to make them stand out from the crowd.

Here are some open topics about toy selecting elements to discuss and explore:

The Goals of Toy Selection for Toddlers

How to define the goals at Toddlers' stage? Undoubtedly, parents, with diverse family backgrounds, have different expectations from their children. Nevertheless, what skills can we expect a Toddler to acquire in general? And what are their STEM goals? To find out the answers, it's fundamentally important to understand how to map the core STEM skills to achieve the goals of raising Toddlers through home education and toys.

The essential elements include:

• Physics skills: realization of physical elements：
  - Colors
  - Graphics
  - Images
  - Sounds
  - Forces

• Random creation and imagination.

• Math skills:
  - Number sense and recognition
  - Counting and quantifying
  - Geometrical shapes and patterns
  - Addition and subtraction
  - Object sorting

As described, STEM provides children with the foundation and critical skills to succeed in education and career. Studies show that developing cognitive abilities and skills is the initial process and goal of further and better education for Toddlers. In other words, STEM education demands higher cognitive capacities, whether kids or adults. For this reason, to set the right goals and select the right toys has become as important as to achieve those skills.

STEM-related toys, such as magnetic tiles and construction building blocks, have made a considerable contribution to kids' development in regard to general or STEM skills. In short, at the toddlers' stage, the main goal is to develop their abilities and skills to enhance cognitive functions.

Toys Are Toddler’s Best Companions

From Toddler to Adult years, we will have many different companions - our parents, family members, friends, pets, as well as toys. Toys are indeed the only non-living beings among them. If you see it in another way, you may find that kids spend more time playing toys than with friends, especially Toddlers, because the toy is something that will grow with the child and will not die.

Or, to put it another way, toys are the best companions to Toddlers through the journey from Education to Career years. Take, for example; scalable magnetic tiles toys would grow in parallel through Toddlers' life. It would help the kid to grow in terms of various skills mentally. Year after year, they have a higher chance to build up with greater complexities and capabilities. It is mutual growth indeed.

How Would Scalable Toys Influence Toddlers' Development?

Having mentioned the importance of STEM education for the young generation, kindergarteners, as well as parents, play a significant role to improve and create a more dynamic learning environment to engage with Toddlers. Through the journey from Toddler to Teen years, toys that will grow with the kids are 'living' companions, as valuable as their real living companions. When Toddlers grow to Pre-schoolers along with the toys, they will be influenced by their toys little by little. Once they have acquired the essential elementary skills of Physics, Mathematics, Creativity, and Art, they already have some thoughts to build up something new. As a result, the existing toys cannot meet their demands any longer.

For this reason, scalable toys that allow kids to expand whatever they have in mind would bring more value to them. More importantly, it will help the kids to engage with the toys during the process of building and upgrading a house, a bridge, a castle, and so forth. Similarly, the process of how the toys grow with toys applies to all age levels.

When you are reading here, whether you still keep the toys from your childhood or not, why not spend some time reflecting if the toys influenced you to some extent.

Do you still share the same goals as your childhood years?

Have you reached your goals?

Being affected by the whole environment in a Hi-Tech digital time, how would you plan to educate your child?

For sure, choosing the right toys would be the first step.

Most importantly, how to parent and educate our kids with the right toys would be a constant lesson that all parents should take.