Fun Holiday Ideas That Are Beneficial for Your Kids

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Amy approached me asking if she could share her insight on holiday gifts and ideas that are also beneficial to your kids so how could I refuse! this is a great post for all you parents who don’t just want to buy video games this Christmas! These ideas are also really frugal for those who are looking to save some pennies this Christmas! BONUS! Firstly:

A bit about Amy:

Amy Mia Goldsmith is a literature graduate from Melbourne with a lot of different interests in life. Her absolute favorite role is the role of a loving mother to Sophie (Age 5). For more information on where you can find Amy scroll to the bottom for her social links (after reading of course) 🙂

*Guest Post* – Fun Holiday Ideas That Are Beneficial for Your Kids

With Christmas waiting just around the corner, children all over the world are dreaming about Santa and his little elves who are making toys for good kids.

They will be talking about nothing else for a while, and you will be listening carefully so you can make their wishes come true.

However, you would also want the gifts that you are going to give them to not only be fun but educational and inspiring as well.

This is a short list of fun and beneficial gifts for your kids this Christmas.

Games that enhance motor skills

Kids who spend a lot of time playing video games have poor gross and fine motor skills, so perhaps the best thing is to give them some of the old-fashioned toys that are going to help their vision and motor skills develop better.

You would be surprised how beneficial play dough actually is, and all the simplest things that go with it too. Little buttons, strings, feathers, pearls, beads, twigs, etc.

Let your child make mud cakes (or play dough cakes) and decorate them with buttons and twigs, and give them some strings and let them put beads and macaroni on it so that they make pasta necklaces.

You can also teach them about symmetry and counting by making symmetrical patterns out of rocks and shells, an activity that can keep them occupied for hours. The Imagination tree wrote a great post about this here.

Space perception toys and games

Hand-eye coordination is sadly underdeveloped with most kids, because of the kids of activities they take up during the day (the activities are usually playing video games on phones and tablets).

To make them get to know their own bodies faster, buy them toys which will inspire them to move and use their eyes and hands – balls, marbles, pick-up sticks, bean bag toss, ping pong…

it may not sound challenging enough, but once they start playing with these you will see how much more comfortable they are in their bodies, and you may even inspire love for certain sports as well.

Visual thinking toys and games

You remember how you were thinking about what time is ‘too soon’ to start teaching your kids about selling and mathematics?

Well, by helping your children develop certain skills through games and toys, you can provide them with vital basics for academics: spelling, reading, and math.

Even the simplest memory games and jigsaw puzzles can help develop visual thinking, so children will have better visual memory, pattern recognition, visualization, and eye tracking skills. Why not checkout these 8 working memory boosters from understood.org.

You can also introduce card games such as Go Fish, dominos, Bingo, Math dice, and certain story cubes.

Cognitive skills enhancing games

Helping your child develop cognitive skills will give them a good foundation for learning and memorizing things later on in life.

Basic logic, and deduction are used with simple and yet very challenging games such as Sudoku, Mastermind, and Square Rot Puzzle.

What is more, if you turn ordinary mathematic tasks into a game you can spark their interest and keep them focused for a long time.

Your kids can play fun math games online as well (E.g at funbrain.com), and there they can practice their adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing in fun new ways.

Understandably, video games and mobile phones will be pretty high on their wish list this Christmas, but you should be thinking about their future as well.

If they play with toys like these they will be developing and grow to become happy and healthy adults who know how to use their hands as well as their minds.

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*Note: All Pictures are Courtesy of Amy, I do not own them*

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