FLAMINGO -CHINA.COM

With the family budget easily depleted these days, parents can use some information plus a little imagination to put together ordinary things at home for the preschooler to play and learn with.
Empty milk cans, plastic containers, toilet paper rolls, bottle tops, pots and pans can be easily transformed into homemade learning toys. This is done in China, Israel, and America, where scrap materials and home objects are recycled into children’s toys. Commercially made toys have not only become expensive, but oftentimes, they have a limited number of uses. The child is easily bored and the new toy is soon forgotten in one comet of the house. Homemade toys, however, can be a more resourceful and creative medium for learning, if well received. One of the basic steps in making toys is to understand what concepts children learn and how they can learn these. Some of these concepts or rules are mentioned here. One is the permanence of objects or the principle that “things remain the same even when they move and disappear.” The simple game of “hide and seek” can be played with an infant by moving objects in and out of his sight. For the older 3- and 4-year-olds, a tray full of common objects (spoon, napkin, cup, and socks) can be shown. Identifying each object in the tray is a learning game in itself. Once the child knows what objects are in a tray, he is asked to close his eyes and an object is removed from the tray. The child then tries to guess which object was removed. Similarly, homemade clay teaches the child that certain objects can change shapes. The recipe of this clay is 1 part flour (old flour will do), part salt to harden, and ¼ part water for consistency Another concept is that of spatial relations or “things occupy space and move in space in different ways.” Pasting colorful magazine pictures on a hard board and cutting these up into simple pieces (fewer pieces for younger children) can make great homemade puzzles. Means-end activities (causality concept) teach the child that different effects can be produced on different materials. Paper can be used
any other material. This can be crumpled, dropped, pulled, or torn. Draw the child’s attention by asking him to name the action performed. Questions such as “what do you think will happen if I…?” elicit critical thinking. The dimension concept is often used in most preschool activities. Children learn various sensual concepts such as touch, taste, hear, smell, and see. The “matching” game entails the pairing of similar objects, varying in color, shape, sound, or texture. Matching two-of-a-kind objects in the house (a pair of shoes, 2 toothbrushes, 2 spoons, etc.) can be fun game.