School Zone's 3D Magnetic Teacher: Kindergarten may sound like a horror movie script development session gone horribly awry, but it's one of our favorite developmental toys of the season. It's rare for a toy's design to combine manipulables with the intrinsic interest of magnets with such a variety of matching, sorting, classifying, and reading and math activities and come out with something that is so intuitive and engaging at the toddler level, but after two weeks of playing with this activity set with our virtually three-year-old Z (her birthday's in a week), we give it a whole family's worth of thumbs way up.
One of the great, understated features of this metal-box activity set is that every single one of nearly 100 magnets has a specific home on the inside of the tin's surface. Z got this right away with the set's soft magnet animals, and it is beginning to dawn on her that the set's many tiny square and rectangular magnets could feed her passion for meticulous organizing, sorting and manipulating small objects.
The puffy magnetic animals are a nice touch. One side of the animals is a solid color, and matches up with the outline of the animal in the box lid.
The other side features a colorful pattern, and matches up with some of the several activity sheets which can be placed in the box, using the box's magnetic surface to affix magnets to the scene. It was a big deal for Z to figure out that if the animal didn't fit its outline, she could flip it over.
These laminated sheets do stray towards a worksheet-driven model of learning which is not front and center in our educational plan, but the fun of using the magnets to solve the equations, fill in words' blanked-out letters, and place objects in their environments gives them a bit more panache. At half a dozen double-sided worksheets, you'll run through them quickly anyway, and need to either make your own additional ones (could be fun) or turn to the magnetic box's lid, which features a clever grid of squares just the right size for composing words using the square letters. The set includes capital and lowercase letters and a partial set of lowercase duplicates, probably those most likely to be needed in constructing simple words.
Our basic impression of this toy is that it has a lot of fun potential for young children despite having a high educational value. It was designed in conjunction with Yale professors who clearly have a lot of child developent smarts, and we like that this toy can serve a wide age range. The only down side we can see in giving a three-year-old unfettered access to this toy is that they are likely to lose some of its tiny pieces over time, which could render it very frustrating down the road when your child is trying to use the letters and numbers in a constructive way. (1+8 = a number lost under the fridge years ago, etc.) So we are using this set with Z under supervision for now, encouraging her to see its early possibilities through her own interests and compulsions, and confident it will grow with her as long as we keep the Roomba away from those stray letters.
A few minor quibbles:
- One reason every magnet has its place is that just tossing all of the magnets in and closing the case means having to reach back in and shove magnets out of the way of the lip repeatedly to get the case to close without having magnets lodged under the hinge. But putting all those bits in place takes time, especially if your child has decided they're done playing with it and aren't interested in that particular activity.
- Being metal, the box has sustained a bit of surface scratching of the inside already, which may over time make it attractive, and it dents easily if dropped.
- The one thing the set lacks that would make the numbers as useful in the long-term as the letters would be the inclusion of plus, minus, and equals signs, which could have been subbed out for a couple of the varieties of insects or fruits.
3 comments:
"These laminated sheets do stray towards a worksheet-driven model of learning which is not front and center in our educational plan."
Do you have any posts where you go into more depth about how you've come up with your educational plan for Z?
I really like how this blog makes me think about teaching my daughter in ways I hadn't thought of before and the importance of letting her play and discover things on her own or with just a little guidance.
This looks like a great product and another one I'll buy when V is older due to your suggestion.
Another reason to supervise three-year olds with this is the choking/magnet swallowing hazard. I don't know about Z, by my three-year old twins are still putting things in their mouths!
@Maya: Glad you're interested! We will blog about this plan as it evolves. We certainly could blog about some of our "first principles" soon if we sat down and thought about it, and it might be a good exercise for us. Every parent figures this out as they go. Then again, we would try to do it with some sensitivity, because there are a lot of different styles and priorities, and what works for one family may not for another.
@Sandra: Great point. The "traditional" rating of 3+ assumes that at the arrival of a third birthday a child will magically stop putting small objects in his or her mouth. Z stopped putting things in her mouth very early on, and has a fixation with small objects that is entirely non-oral. If your child is still putting small things in his or her mouth, they should definitely be supervised with this toy, as well as many others which claim to be safe for ages 3 and up.
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