Learning Skills
To assist you in making your toy choices from our Mimitoys store, we have set out symbols within our product descriptions to show where we think a toy helps your child develop a key skill.� These symbols are described below.�
Note also that at the end of each Learning Skill description you can click to view all toys that provide that learning skill.
Creativity
Creativity provides an outlet for your children's imagination, developing their ability to process thoughts and transform them into something tangible. This builds self esteem and encourages greater communication. Children explore their creative side by expressing themselves through art, music, movement or role play. These toys also develop many other essential skills such as coordination and fine motor skills.
Pretend Play
Pretend play helps children to become familiar with the world in which they live. Your children can play at experiencing new situations or emotions in a way in which they feel safe and protected. This gives them confidence when they meet new challenges in the real world. From the age of two, children have the analytical abilities and language skills to start making up stories and participating in role play.
Sensory Development
From birth, toys that stimulate your children's senses help them to understand the world around them and are essential for intellectual development. Babies are fascinated by colourful, noisy and multi-textured toys, encouraging them to look listen and touch. Older children also benefit from multi-sensory stimulation. Engaging and combining all their senses is the essential first step towards counting, reading and writing.
Hand to Eye Coordination
Hand to eye coordination is the control of eye movement and the processing of what we see to guide bodily movement. It is essential throughout life in performing simple everyday tasks like picking up a book from a table as well as performing more complicated tasks like playing ball sports. The toys that promote hand to eye coordination are also key in developing good fine motor skills, essential for core competences such as writing.
View Hand to Eye Coordination Toys
Problem Solving
In our everyday lives we are constantly being challenged with problems to solve. If children learn to rise to the challenges and develop a clear and systematic way of tackling them, this will give them a greater sense of self-confidence and boost their self-esteem. These toys encourage children them to think logically and work things out for themselves.
Reading
By listening to stories or looking at picture books, children begin to develop their concentration and communication skills and really start wanting to read for themselves. In addition to this, any toy that asks your child to identify shapes and sounds or that requires matching pictures with sounds will helps build key skills needed for reading.
Discover the World
These toys encourage children to look at the world around them, to explore and appreciate what they see. It doesn't matter whether it's about animals, other countries, planets - understanding more about our world awakens curiosity in children, introduces them to the concept of learning and makes it more interesting and relevant to their own lives.
Physical Development Activity
Regular physical activity is extremely important for physical development and it has been shown that early physical play is a key factor in the amount of self confidence that a child has when starting school. From birth, children benefit from physical play to help them develop coordination, control and balance.
View Physical Development Activity Toys
Social Skills
These skills include daily interaction skills such as sharing, taking turns, and allowing others to talk without interrupting, as well as learning empathy and compassion for others. By encouraging sharing and showing the benefits of cooperation these toys will help your children to develop an understanding of themselves and others by learning how to relate to others, make friends and play happily together.
