Holiday Gift Guide
Your child’s vision is not just the clarity through which they see the world. It's also the ability to process that information. Games are an excellent way to develop and enhance how we process visual information. These skills include:
Visual Discrimination: ability to discern details. It is essential for reading.
Visual Figure Ground: ability to identify information from a busy background. Think “where is Waldo?”
Visual Directional Skills: ability to understand up & down, left & right on ourselves and others. A key skill to reduce letter reversals. It is also important as a parent to understand, this skill takes time to develop and reversals are normal until about the third grade.
Visualization: ability to create a mental picture. When you read a book, are you able to visualize the story or are they just words?
Visual Closure: ability to mentally complete an incomplete picture. In reading, our brain uses visual closure to recognize letters and words without fully decoding them thus increasing efficiency.
Visual Memory: ability to remember what we see. When learning a new word, children need visual memory to retrieve that information.
Our Holiday gift guides provides some ideas on how to develop these areas of vision and reduce screen time:
Age 2-5:
This innovative game encourages pre-readers and early readers alike to match the pictures and words on their challenge cards with the tiles revealed in the Zingo! Zinger device.
Set imaginations in colourful motion! Introduce young builders to the world of gears with this starter set featuring fun, bright new colours and kid-friendly pieces for easy construction.
“Where’s the duck?” “Can you find the apple?” This fun, active game helps young children learn the names of colours, shapes, animals, foods and more while seeking and finding each match.
Learn your numbers the hands-on way with this fun wooden peg puzzle! The Hape Number Matching Puzzle includes a wooden puzzle tray with 10 colourful pieces, shaped like every number from 1 to 10!
Ages 5-7:
The award-winning Spot It! game is now available in a Junior Animals edition! This version is adapted for an ideal game experience for younger players. There are 30 animals from land, sea, and sky to be spotted on 31 cards.
This game is Sequence for kids. Players are each dealt cards with animals on them which correspond to animals on the board. When it is your turn a card is chosen from your hand and placed in your discard pile and a chip is placed on the animal on the board.
Your first SET game! With this two-sided game board kids can start to play as early as age 3! Side 1: Match your tile to a square on the board. Get a point chip for every SET made. Start to recognize SETs while matching color, number and symbols. Side 2: Now that you know what a SET is, it's time to flip the board and have fun racing to find as many SETs as you can!
Be the first player to flip all your monkeys into the tree! Play with a friend or own your own.
Teach kids as young as 5 years old the basic programming skills necessary to code, including sequencing and loops, without a computer. It's never too early to learn computer coding.
Age 7+
Your patient Sam is feeling a bit under the weather. Can you "operate" and make him better, or will you get the buzzer? Grab the tweezers and try with all of your might to take out all of his funny ailments. Can you help him with his headphone headache or his gamer's thumb? Operate with your steadiest hand, but don't forget to steer clear of the sides and avoid lighting the light!
2 brain-twisting solitaire games in 1 pocket-sized case! Using combinations of coloured connected beads, students construct colourful designs in 2 unique formats
Q-Ba-Maze 2.0 is a unique system of colourful cubes that interlock to form a marble run. The BIG difference? You can create marble maze sculptures in the form of animals, geometric shapes or any other design!
Laser Chess is a two-player game that combines the spatial thinking skills of chess with the high-tech fun of laser beams.
Roller Coaster Challenge is the follow up to Gravity Maze, a hugely popular combination of a marble run and a logic game. Players set up the board based on the instructions on the challenge card, and determine where to place the remaining pieces
Hope you have a fun filled holiday season surrounded by your loved ones!
