Activity Books for Children – Benefits and How to choose the right one
The words that are on parents’ radar from the day their children start holding a crayon. Parents are always on the lookout to find the perfect books that have activities to help with cognitive as well as motor skills. So, let’s think about the simple question.
How do activity books help in building on the most crucial developmental skills at a tender age, as young as one and half years?
It’s quite simple! The word says activity – an action that involves. The books have tasksildren. In the end that is the whole idea of it, isn’t it? that involve the young minds to be busy with something that is constructive, brain boosting, something that engages their ever absorbing minds, and in turn contributes towards improving their intellectual skillset. Advantages of activity books are numerous.
1) Identification and Recognition
First and foremost is introducing and practicing basic competencies of identification, recognition, and differentiation. The formative years of education are all about improving and guiding visual perception. Introducing basic concepts such as shape, size, colour, counting, and comparison can be done in a way that is stimulating and engaging for kids. Once introduced, with different types of exercises, reinforcing the same concepts is important too.
2) Concentration and Focus:
Activity books are a great tool to enhance focus, increase attention span, and develop concentration. The activities are designed to offer hands-on understanding of concepts. Bite-sized tasks in activity books can be completed in a short time of 2 to 3 minutes. Thus, children are compelled to finish it. Completion of a task gives an immense boost to confidence and sense of accomplishment.3) Intellectual Development
Activity books layout tasks with simple instructions and attractive illustrations. With such intuitive presentations, these books help develop comprehension skills. Kids learn to understand the task at hand with minimal prompts and instructions. Simple directions and visual clues given in the activities get the thinking wheels turning. Kids learn to infer given information and easily develop logical reasoning skills. Better understanding of activities from start to finish also contributes towards better communication.4) Fine Motor Skills
Coming to physical skills, kids activity books help greatly in developing hand eye coordination, fine motor skills, pincer grip, pressure techniques, and grip stability. Children learn to control hand movements as they draw or colour in designated areas. Colouring within a shape, connecting the dots, following the pattern, finding the right path in maze, and cutting and folding along the dotted lines are some of the time-tested activities that help kids become school ready.Now comes the million dollar question:
How to select an activity book for kids
or worksheet that is apt for your child ?To answer this, parents must ask out loud – which skill sets am I looking to develop? A well-recognized objective will help you select the most appropriate activities for your child.
- To build concentration, I-spy activities, memory games, and puzzles are some activities that could help. Word search and spot the differences are advanced level activities that develop problem solving skills and improve attention to detail. Explain the activities at the start, and then give children sufficient time to complete them. Doing these at their own pace allows them to stay focused on working out the solution on their own. As a result, the span of attention widens and concentration increases.
- Comprehension skills and communication can be worked up with almost all kinds of activities. However, language based activities such as phonics, word search, cross-words, and match-the-tag lines activities are some common types that enhance comprehension skills. Story building, fill in the blanks, and creative writing worksheets help prepare kids with advanced writing skills.
- Activities such as puzzles, odd one out, simple coding activities, mental math, Sudoku, and brain teasers introduce kids to abstract thinking and logical reasoning. These help in taking the first step towards developing problem solving faculties and making them future ready to find solutions in various life situations.
- To develop fine motor skills, choose mazes, jumbled strings, patterns, match the columns, cutting, sticking, and connect the dots. These simple yet interesting activities help familiarize kids with holding a crayon or a pencil. Sticker activities help with hand eye coordination and improve visual awareness.
- Messy art, colouring, designs, doodling, pattern making are some that encourage imagination and creativity. Let your child’s ideas flow freely without being worried about if the art looks perfect. At formative age, it is imperative that children get a chance to explore and experiment. A simple blob of paint made by a child will introduce him or her to different aspects of it – size, shape, amount of water in paint, splash with it falls on paper, spreading and absorbing of it and lot more!
Simple or complex, entry level activity or advance level with strategic thinking, a well-designed activity book offers plentiful benefits. The ones with its core objective well defined are great tools for parents who are looking at holistic development of cognitive skills for their children. Boosting intellectual capacities need small size information inputs to be given a regular interval for better understanding as well as practice. Attractive presentations and illustrations and simple instructions in activity books make learning fun. Theme based activities are well perceived as like ones are grouped together for reinforcement of concepts. Young children who do these with their parents bond amazingly as the sessions provide mutual understanding and cooperation. With this, the concept is not only learned, retained, and reproduced, but also enjoyed by children. In the end that is the whole idea of it, isn’t it?
