Parlour games are great for sharing the fun. So many of today’s toys and games are played alone, especially electronic ones. Parlour games involve family time, shared experiences, interaction that is frivolous and without agenda. If you ever feel like all you do is hurry your children along from A to B, then spend five …
Colour is one of the first attributes children notice about anything. It’s something children pay attention to early on. The more colour names a child knows, the better equipped they will be in the nuances of description and visual expression. Artists tend to notice more about the world than most people because they look more …
Does your child enjoy making up stories? Does she pretend to be you, using toys and other props to imitate adults? This is dramatic play, one of the four types of play. You can read about the others here: What is dramatic play? Children imitate what they see. They watch you washing the dishes then …
Long before your child utters her first words she has developed both a rich vocabulary and a sophisticated understanding of syntax. It’s all in there, waiting to come out. But there are other factors in play, such as the co-ordination required to form the sounds that make up our speech. Only the simplest sounds can …
And so we’ve reached the end of the 100 Toys journey. As Maurice Sendak might have said if he’d run a website for the under 5s: Through birth, in and out of the toy box, over five years and into the light of our very own imaginations. It’s been fun. But now we must part. …