If you are looking for something for your small child to stay busy with, or if you are trying to homeschool older kids and you have a small child too you’ll love these Best Educational Entertaining Toys For Pre-K!
I began learning more about educational and entertaining toys for pre-K kids quite a few years back. We were a growing family in less than 1000 square feet of space and toys were overrunning our home.
It’s then I started looking into how to minimize toys and I developed the idea’s that you can find IN THIS POST ON MINIMIZING TOYS.
Since then I’ve always got an eye open for toys that fit the Montessori and Reggio Emilia criteria.
You’ll want to head over to my YouTube channel to get a nice close up and description of all the toys I feature!
What Is The Reggio Emilia Approach?
This is an educational method developed by a pedagogist in Italy for preschool and very early elementary education. It emphasises experiential learning, relationship driven environments, and self guided curricula.
According to this pedagogy, children have 100 languages, or ways of expressing, understanding, thinking and encountering experiences and others.
With Reggio Emilia, children must have a bit of say over what they learn, sensory activities are used, and children get to be very hands on (kinesthetic). Children are also encouraged to interact with others and explore, and given resources to do this and express themselves. You can read more about this teaching philosophy HERE.
What Is the Montessori Approach?
You gotta hand it to those Italians. They’ve really got it going on with the early elementary education philosophies!
Montessori Education was developed by an Italian doctor, and is another child centered educational approach based on scientific observations of children. This involved mixed aged classrooms (perfect for homeschool families), allowing students to choose activities, encourages discovery, freedom, and specialized educational materials that are natural instead of plastic.
With Montessori the teacher or parent prepares environments and spaces where things are organized by subject area within reach of the child.
Another important aspect to Montessori method is observing the child, watching closely to see exactly WHERE and with WHAT they need when it comes to education, and then assisting them with the area’s they need to learn/master. There is more, you can read all about it HERE as well and I found a great video on it HERE (FYI we all really enjoyed the video-it’s delightful)!
Aesthetics to Best Educational Entertaining Toys For Pre-K
As a parent, I have to admit that one of the bonus points of these toys is that they are not eyesores! In fact, most of them are so pretty to look at that I keep them on display (in keeping with Montessori principles).
Of course this is great for the kids because when the toys are on display they are encouraged to play with them.
Video
So now head over to my YouTube Channel to SUBSCRIBE TO MY VIDEOS because very soon I’ll be publishing a video showing and detailing the best educational entertaining toys for pre-k!
Read Also
Minimizing Toys
References;
https://www.verywellfamily.com/reggio-emilia-approach-2764968