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The Use of Children's Toys in Promoting Healthy Development

When buying baby toys and children's toys a parent's main concern is usually the 'play value' of an item more accurately how many hours fun will a child derive from a new toy. Nobody wants to see the traditional clich of spending good money on a toy and find the child playing with the box it came in! Another important factor and one that most parents don't consider is the benefits a toy can have on a child's development and growth.

Children develop in a number of ways namely; cognitive (mental ability), motor (physically), and socially (through interaction with others). A well thought out child's toy can, as well as being a lot of fun to play with, help to stimulate development in one or more of these areas. So when we visit the toy shops are there any simple do's and don'ts we should be considering when making that all important purchase?

First of all, and rather controversially, you can pretty much avoid the new wave of e-learning toys and computer based educational toys on the market. Studies have shown that these toys do little to stimulate a child's mental development as they tend to limit a child's mental options in the pursuit of a single pre-determined goal. Toys that restrict a child's imagination and ability to think 'out of the box' do little to promote learning as they do not develop new mental strategies or patterns of thinking. As any parent knows a child's imagination has Kidrobot limits and it is this ability to think differently from adults that allows a child to grow cognitively at such an incredible rate. By playing a game with a fixed path and single outcome the child is never encouraged to think around a problem.

Research studies have demonstrated that traditional toys are the most useful when it comes to fueling mental development simply because a child can use them in any number of ways. This allows a playhouse to be anything from a hospital to a shop to the lunar control station for the next mission into space. It is through this creative thinking that children are able to create what the famous Child Physiologist, Jean Piaget, Spider-Man movie 'schemas', or new ways of thinking.

Traditional baby toys also come up trumps when it comes to developing physical ability too. A child's physical development can be divided into two major categories; gross motor skills (the development of the big muscles so we can run, jump and carry) and the fine motor skills (these allow us to manipulate things with our hands with great skill and dexterity). For years humble traditional toys such as shape sorters and hammer and peg benches have been great for helping hand eye co-ordination and developing little muscles and bikes, tricycles and scooters have been brilliant at developing the size, strength and co-ordination of the bodies larger muscles in older children.

Finally it seems simple toys may also be the answer when it comes to social development too. Toys that encourage interaction and team work are a great way to develop a child's ability to empathise and work with others. Role play toys are brilliant at this, allowing a child to try new situations in a safe environment and also to work with other children to create more complex make believe situations. They allow a child to act out situations and better understand the world around them whilst feeling secure at the same time.

So next time you go shopping for that killer Christmas or Birthday present for your child consider the following points.

1. Can the toy be used in a number of different ways?
2. Can a child transform the purpose of the toy with ball jointed dolls own imagination and ideas?
3. Is the toy fun, safe, sturdy and exciting?
4. Does the toy offer different levels of activity so it can grow with the child?
5. Does the toy allow for social interaction with other children?
6. Will this toy still be popular with a child in a years time or merely a marketing fad?

Remember that despite all the expensive marketing, glossy adverts and eye catching packaging the American Girls collection robot dinosaur won't offer a child anywhere near the same level of developmental opportunities as the simple pull along wooden dog. Whatsmore long after Robo-Dino's batteries have gone dead, good old spotty dog will still be going for 'walkies'.

Gary is an expert on the role of children's toys in child development and has writes extensively about the threat modern living is having on the way our kids turn out. He also runs the online monkeyshine.co.uktoy shop Monkeyshine, a UK retailer that specializes in quality traditional monkeyshine.co.ukbaby toys and children's toys that are selected for their positive benefits on kids.

posted by biibj @ 6:13 AM 0 comments

3 Easy Tips on How to Make a PC Faster

This article Shogun Warriors discuss buy world of warcraft gold ways you can make your PC faster without spending big bucks on hardware upgrades that are totally unnecessary. The root problem of a slow PC could be hardware, but most of the time it is due to lack of attention and maintenance to the software operating system and its mechanisms that leads to a slowdown in performance.

There are many ways to ramp up the speed of your PC in just a few simple steps. If there is any money to be spent on hardware, then I guess one way is to buy cheap ram and upgrade the amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) in your system. In this day and age, figures like 256 or 512 mb are just not enough so you have you maintain figures that run up to and over 2 gigs.

This is because today's current applications are very memory dependent, even simple ones like iTunes seem to suck up a lot of memory when they are running in the background, not to mention some Antivirus software programs. Most of us use the PC for months and months without bothering to defragment the hard disk. Fragmented data and lost files that Windows has to hunt down and recompile are one of the major issues that lead to a loss of performance speed in PCs. What you need to do is to simply initiate the process of defragmentation, which is provided free of charge in any Windows OS, every 2 Elvis or so.

You will not regret this decision, because you will see a marked percentile increase in the speed of your computer when Windows no longer has to hunt down and refragment data files whenever you want to load your program. Also, manage your files and find out what programs are running on start-up. A lot of the times we simply install programs without knowing how each and every one of them are 1962 Topps baseball cards to utilise our system resources, and too many program load commands on Windows start-up is the cause of extremely long load times in some computers.

Make sure that only critical software are being loaded and check your processes under the Windows Task Manager to assess which ones are using an insane amount of memory while running in the background. You can save more than 30% of system performance just by getting rid of start up programs from your system.

The last method that you need to adhere to is to keep a clean and unclogged registry. Any computer that does not use a registry cleaner will have at the very least, a clogged registry with null values, orphan keys and bad command lines that Windows will constantly trip over in its ongoing daily operations.

Most registry cleaners are freely available on the internet and the sizes are small. Within minutes you will clean the registry with the simple to use tool and you will see the effects almost immediately. So there are your 3 easy tips on how to make PC faster that anyone can follow and do.

pcaholiclp/mm/speed-up-pc.phpClick Here to improve computer performance. Logan Albright helps thousands of people optimize their computers through a proper computer check up. He is an authority on troubleshooting computer problems at pcaholicpcaholic.

posted by biibj @ 5:25 AM 0 comments