Did you know that toys and play enhance your children’s development? They can impact their cognitive, emotional, language, social and motor skills. Play times allow children to explore and learn in a safe environment. The toys you provide your children with become learning tools. Therefore, these are reasons children should play with farm animal toys.
Encourage Language Skills
When you provide farm animal toys, you can ask your children to identify the names of these animals. You can discuss their attributes, characteristics and sounds with your children as well. You can also direct your children to place the animals in specific locations or ask them where they put them. You may even teach them the signs for each animal using ASL.
Working with these toys helps your children develop language skills because it enhances their vocabulary as they learn the toys’ names. In addition, they learn proper sentence structure through your play. They also gain knowledge of position words, such as there, between, behind, under, etc. Kids also learn to tell stories about their farm and act out scenarios.
Enhance Sensory and Fine-Motor Skills
High-quality toys, from highly detailed farm animals to dinosaur toys, give your children opportunities to learn about textures as they play. These toys stimulate the eye and enhance visual acuity. They have bright, eye-catching colors and decorations. The learning process requires tactile, visual and auditory discernment.
They also gain hand-eye coordination as they move the toys around the room. In addition, toy size is important because different sizes require different levels of fine-motor skills. Toys with moving parts also require that your children move them with their hands, while just picking up their farm toys strengthens their hands. They may also stack, sort or move their animals around, further developing their fine motor skills.
Develop Critical Thinking Skills
Because they are realistic, farm animal toys encourage children to ask questions about their worlds and investigate and learn new things. They can place their toys in scenarios that require critical thinking skills to solve. When they play with others, they learn to share and how to get what they want without hurting the other children. You can also give them scenarios, e.g., how can the pig get out of the pen without the farmer knowing?
Open-ended toys, such as farm animals, dinosaurs and bird figurines, encourage play without limits. These toys also help children develop their memories and improve their cognition.
Produce Creativity and Imagination
Farm animal toys encourage creativity and role-play. As children play with realistic toys, they start creating stories or acting out stories you read to them. Kids can designate animals to run the farm, move the machines or just play with each other. They can run through complicated scenarios, such as disagreements, or set up zoos you can walk through with them. They gain access to a new world through these toys where they can work on their life skills as well.
Children need play time, and they need toys that encourage their cognitive, fine-motor, imagination and language development.