Cognitive skills are essential to a child’s ability to grasp ideas and concepts. From the moment a child is born, they begin to develop and sharpen their cognitive skills through play. It is necessary to provide your child with a variety of toys that promote their learning and development in all areas of life. development, including cognitive development.
Because of all this, parents they must see and value the importance not only of games, but also of toys in order to develop the cognitive abilities of babies and children. It is essential for later, as they grow, to be able to have a better learning in academic activity, in learning rules and routines and also to encourage them to be successful people in their future adult life.
Toys for babies
Newborns develop cognitive abilities mainly through observation, since they do not have the strength needed to hold and manipulate the toys. This does not mean that toys are not useful in children’s cognitive development. For example, mobile toys attract a baby’s focus and attention, board picture books are also suitable because they promote identification and listening.
You can also use a handkerchief to hide and display a toy for your baby. By the time your baby begins to look for the toy under the scarf, they will have mastered the gaze and discovered object permanence, a great progress without a doubt.
Toys for young children
The stage in which a child begins to explore and discover new things, they are countless toys that will help them stimulate their senses, to observe, to ask you questions, to make connections, to solve problems and to understand the world around them… all this thanks to toys and play.
Playing with puppets encourages imagination, thinking and abstract language skills, blocks on the other hand, promote counting, sorting and skills problem solving. The way toys are sorted also helps children establish relationships between objects, just like with simpler puzzles.
You don’t have to buy too many toys
You don’t have to It is necessary to constantly buy new toys to promote cognitive abilities in babies and children. Buying too many toys, plus it becomes too expensive, is not necessary and in the long run, all the toys will be stuck in a box without anyone using them, so it’s a waste of money .
Toys don’t have to be very sophisticated to be appropriate, they just need to be able to help children practice their most important basic skills. Most likely, the toys or objects to enhance the cognitive development of the baby or child have some common components that make them useful toys to promote this development.
For example, at bath time You can help your child squeeze water out of the sponge to fill cups, causing the cups to sink into the tub. There are simple activities that can build children’s ability to anticipate, predict outcomes, and understand what consequences mean.
Another example would be filling a plastic bottle with rocks and seashells. sea and close it well so that it cannot be opened. As your child shakes the plastic bottle he will observe the sounds so he will understand cause and effect, predicting the results. Wooden spoons, cardboard boxes, plastic containers or empty egg cartons are everyday objects that can help babies’ cognitive development.