How can STEM toys help boost creativity and critical thin...

Creativity and critical thinking are crucial skills that can help children attain success in life. With the rapid advancements in modern technology, it is difficult to predict the industries and jobs that will be in store for our children’s future. Therefore, as you teach your kids the essence of solving problems, thinking creatively, and solving critically will only help them to achieve future success.

To encourage creative thinking in your children, one must ensure that your little one is engaged actively in things like open-end play & experiences involving art and craft. As such, high-end, interactive toys by Smartivity can ensure skill development while playing within the young minds. As parents, you should maximise children’s cognitive development by introducing them to creative toys or activity games for kids - right from an early stage of life.

How Can Toys Help Children’s Cognitive Development?

Creativity is not just about promoting artwork. Toys, especially STEM toys, can spark imagination and creativity in the young minds by offering them an array of materials to act out or work with.

Smartivity’s STEM toys can help your kids develop a variety of skills - especially creativity and cognitive thinking. Interactive toys featuring intense patterns and colours can allow children ample time to ensure that their imaginations are running wild while building critical creative-thinking skills to be used at a later point of time.

Open-ended creative toys like STEM toys are great for honing imagination skills. It is because it is possible to play with open-ended, interactive toys in several ways. To top it all, these can be effectively modified according to the imagination level of your child.

Furthermore, Smartivity offers a number of DIY activity kits and experiment kits. These activity kits are tailor-made for kids to learn foundational skills. Foundational skills are basic life skills like language skills, numeracy skills etc.that are used for life. These DIY kits come with a range of challenges and gameplays that help preschoolers and early school-going children master these skills in no time.

What are the key benefits of STEM educational toys?

STEM toys by Smartivity leverage the facet of collaborative education. Here are some creative and cognitive benefits of STEM educational toys that you should know about:

Improve Children’s Cognitive Development

Children’s cognitive development takes place significantly during the early stages of life, especially in the first 8 years of life.
You can enrich the cognitive abilities of your beloved one by playing interesting games and solving puzzles with them.
Smartivity offers access to a huge collection of STEM or STEAM toys that are family-friendly and strengthen parent-child bonding.
With improved memory, the overall attention span of children gets improved at the same time. If you wish that your kid learns these core abilities through formal education, it can be challenging.
However, STEM toys bring about experiential learning to the forefront. Advanced STEM toys like block-building materials help children in recognizing and interpreting patterns.
One core cognitive ability that gets developed through the use of STEM interactive toys is the ability to define specific problems. When a kid is capable of perceiving problems, coming across the right solution becomes easy.

Encourage Creative Thinking

Do you wish to promote creativity in children? There are several activities that promote creativity in children as they indulge in activity toys for different age groups.
STEM toys offer access to multiple options for the little minds to think creatively. This not only boosts creative thinking but also promotes observation skills.
When a child observes, he or she is able to think creatively. At the same time, observation tends to be multi-skilled. It includes memory, patience, and self-awareness, and suchlike.
With regular exposure to activity-based toys, creativity promotes critical thinking and problem-solving skills as well.

Solve Problems Through Fun Games

Have you ever observed a child playing with a DIY kit? The wide range of tiny parts might appear like a mountain. However, the situation exists only for a while. As multiple parts start taking a proper shape, the tiny parts are no mountain - but becomes a child’s play.
With time, as the kit gets solved entirely, it has already instilled a sense of problem-solving in the child.
One of the best aspects of STEM toys is that the overall process of learning gets disguised as a fun activity.
The kid never feels the pressure to learn new concepts. In the modern era, soft skills like problem-solving remain in demand. Therefore, it is recommended for parents to invest in STEM toys to allow children to leverage the compounded benefits.

Develop Interpersonal Skills

Toys help in delivering social experiences.
Social experiences involve interactions with other human beings. These experiences are required for mastering communication and social interaction skills.
STEM toys can help kids approach a seemingly difficult topic in a fun-filled atmosphere along with friends and peers.
This helps in building the interpersonal skills of the young minds while encouraging team-work.

Improve Communication through Interaction

Kids learn better when they indulge in fun-filled interactive toys.
STEM toys teach them interesting aspects while developing communication skills with friends.
With proper guidance, any kid is capable of learning with the toys. Due to this, the communication skills of your child with other people will improve significantly.

Boost Spatal & Motor Skills

It is not possible to solve all problems with the help of books alone.
We are known to visualise problems while working towards solving the same.
Spatial skills are essential to a wide range of work-life problems. DIY kits, chess, Pictionary, and construction toys are helpful in boosting the spatial skills of your kid.
At the same time, a number of STEM toys are designed towards getting children involved physically.
To come up with a structure, your child will need to move around while picking up smaller components and involving in other movements. These help in enhancing the motor skills of your little one.
With both intangible and tangible growth, STEM or educational toys by Smartivity contribute to the overall growth & development of your beloved one.

How to Improve Creative Thinking and Imagination

There are several activities in which kids can engage to boost creative thinking and imagination. Some of the activities that you can consider as parents are:

Open-ended Toys: These toys can be played with without having any end goal in mind. Therefore, they promote creative thinking and foster imagination. You can build, break and play with these open-ended toys.

Books: Your kids’ books can offer a good playtime as well. You can consider buying baby-safe sturdy and colourful books. From interesting pop-out pieces to simple stories, books can take your child’s thinking levels to magical places.
Blocks: You can look forward to fostering thinking like equality, measurement, balance, spatial relationships, shapes, physical properties, gravity, cause-and-effect, and so more through interactive, colourful blocks. You can get access to a wide range of blocks - including wooden blocks, magnetic blocks, and so more.
Puzzles: While there is a well-defined solution to any puzzle set, there are different ways to achieve the goal. You can also make use of puzzle pieces in the form of storytelling. Puzzles help in fostering thinking skills while engaging young learners.

Art & Craft Materials: Art and craft materials are simple, cheap and effective ways to foster creativity. Ensure that toys for art & craft are toxic-free and baby-safe. You can get chunky pieces to ensure that it is easier for your little ones to hold effectively. Washable items will only make it immensely simpler for you. With proper supervision, you can introduce glue, tape, scissors, and other materials during art & craft sessions. Be attentive with water, clay dough, and other malleable materials with your children. You can think of paints, markers, stampers, and chalk to instil a notion of creativity during art & craft sessions.

Conclusion

The wide range of benefits of Smartivity toys, coupled with fun-filled elements, serve to be the ideal companion of your child. With a little bit of encouragement, kids are capable of developing the much-needed skills -including creativity and critical thinking.

Don’t know where to start? Smartivity toys are customised for different age groups and themes. There are engineering toys, construction toys, DIY activity and experiment kits and art and craft toys. Meant for kids between ages 3 and 14, Smartivity STEAM toys are designed to boost creativity and critical thinking, refine gross and fine motor skills and improve cognitive ability.

No matter whether your little one is a pre-schooler or a school-going kid, these toys would be their perfect play companions helping them learn scientific concepts in a fun and easy manner. In conclusion, it can be said that STEAM toys and DIY kits can be considered as proper investments for your child’s future.