Educational Toys - Are They Always?

Giving children lots of educational toys sounds very worthy and commendable. More often than not is done from the best possible motives, but, like many other good ideas, there's more to it than meets the eye.

Educational toys can be looked at from more than one point of view. In one sense' everything a young child plays with is educational - if we mean that it helps them to discover themselves, other people and the world around them. However if used in a narrower sense, to focus in on the alphabet, numbers, shapes, colours, matching, discrimination, "getting it right", and other cognitive skills, we confine it with such restricted boundaries that the child can be in danger of "turning off" while we are in danger of forgetting they are a whole person - spirit and body as well as mind.

As with so many other things in life, balance is the key to real educational play. Young children need our support and our willingness to open up their world to a rich variety of experiences and discoveries. If we can give them small tastes of the many different kinds of play touched on in these pages and encourage them to try things, explore things, find out about things and use their bodies, their imagination and their creativity, as well as their brains, they and their world will be enriched by it.

Which is what REAL education is all about!