How Early Years Resources Can Enhance Your Child’s Learning

There’s no question that early years learning through play and activity is crucial in the development of children. Play helps them to develop physically and become more coordinated, while colours and shapes engage the brain and help with cognitive development. Children will always grow and develop in their surroundings, but you can use early years resources to make their surroundings more interesting, engaging and compatible with development. Here we explore the importance of early years resources in the physical and cognitive development of your child.

Physical Development

Motor skill development is one of the most important areas of development throughout early years education. This is about more than just walking and clambering, it’s also about learning to coordinate the body to achieve tasks. This development can be broken into two key areas that you should seek to help your child to develop: gross motor skills and fine motor skills.

Gross Motor Skills

Gross motor skills are the whole body movements that are needed to navigate through the world on an everyday basis. Early years resources such as ankle skippers, summer skis or stepping stones can help your children to develop these skills through play both alone and with others. Encouraging these movements will help them to develop strength and coordination in these movements.

Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills relate to the close control that is important in achieving tasks. These skills create a high level of eye-to-hand coordination that is invaluable and will help your children to manage skills such as unlocking doors or turning on light switches. Toys and games like weaving butterflies, bead kits and nuts and bolts activity packs will all help your child to coordinate their hands with smaller and more intricate tasks.

Providing your child with the right early years resources for physical development will help them to grasp these skills through practice and they will become more coordinated and controlled as a result.

Cognitive Development

Throughout life, children will be tested on their literacy and numeracy abilities, so it’s important to give them a headstart in this and make this learning fun. Cognitive development in children relies on colours and feel to engage them. Simply using cards or writing out letters and numbers will be uninteresting to the child and will not engage them in the learning. Using bright and tactile early years resources can make these lessons into a game, however. Early literacy development should also focus on storytelling, as this engages the child and teaches them how to be creative with language.

Early Literacy

Early literacy development should make use of tactile letters and writing guides that will help the child to begin to recognise letters to associate with sounds. This helps in the development of the ability to read and write. Alongside these, you should make use of storytelling aides that will enable you to bring stories to life for the child. This creative play shows them how to be creative with language and can help them to develop cognitively.

Early Numeracy

Early numeracy relies on more than just learning to count, it will also make use of patterns and sequencing. Creating patterns of one yellow bead and two blue beads, for example, teaches the child the difference between numbers and instils the importance of sequence into them. Early math relies on sequences and is the basis of our numerical system so this can really help them to develop. Early years resources for numeracy development can be great fun to play with.

A child will play and experiment with whatever you put in front of them, but if you put the right early years resources in front of them then you can help their development of cognitive and physical abilities to dramatically improve.