Santa Sees and So Should We: Spying the Best Gifts to Help Children’s Visual Development

Santa sees you when you’re sleeping — all the way from the North Pole! No toy can help kids develop such keen vision, but Santa’s elves make plenty of playthings that help with children’s development — visual and otherwise. Insight Eyecare’s Third Annual Gift Guide looks at toys and games that sharpen visual skills (hand-eye coordination, depth perception, spatial orientation, motor skills, etc.) within four types of play that aid in children’s overall development.

Motor/active/physical play

Gets kids moving while helping them develop gross and fine motor skills and overall integration of muscle, brain and visual functions.

The Balance Teeter Popper is curved on the bottom so kids can rock from side to side in a standing position, developing the aforementioned brain-body-visual skills. Bonus: Suction cups on the bottom make a satisfying popping sound, like bubble wrap, when kids play on a hard surface.

The Wobble Deck also promotes good balance and works a child’s mind and muscles at once, as he or she tries to follow the game’s audio commands without teetering.

The Golf Pool Game from the online retailer Hearthsong combines golf and billiards for competitive play that helps kids with hand-eye coordination. Bonus: Fun for the whole family.

The Balance Blox Slackline is sort of like a gymnast’s balance beam and a tightrope rolled into one, but without the fall hazard. Multiple units can be purchased so kids can develop building as well as balancing skills by creating changeable courses in just about any configuration.

The Bungee Jumper is for younger children who have not yet developed the motor skills and balance to use a traditional pogo stick.

OgoSport Sports Disks have super-elastic membranes that can send a ball flying 150 feet. Suitable for playing catch and traditional ball games with a twist.

Snap-Together Ring Toss from Hearthsong is a physical game that requires spatial awareness and reasoning, as its pieces snap together like jigsaw puzzle pieces into several configurations.

General recommendations: Tetherball; sit and spin toys; variations on swings that require greater balance and spatial awareness including webbed platform swings, bungee swings and tandem swings; racquet sports; disc golf sets; archery.

Constructive/manipulative play

Involves manipulating objects and the environment to create things. Uses finer motor skills, controlled movement and hand-eye coordination. Includes building (with or without tools), and making art and music.

A building game with a satisfying payoff, Hearthsong’s Marble Runaround course complete with skyways, slides and tunnels combines the fun of blocks and marbles.

Ionix Magnetic Building System creates limitless geometric structures including pyramids, working spinners and free-form sculptures with colorful magnetic building beams.

Great Shapes Magnetic Activity Board uses brightly colored magnetic shapes to create designs of your child’s choosing, or to copy the pictures in the deck of cards that comes with it.

For the kid who wants a pony but can’t have one, Hearthsong’s Equestrian Design Kit lets them trace, draw, shade and design their own horses and stable scenes. (Fairy Design Kit also available from Hearthsong.com.)

With the Young Architect 3-D Building Kit, kids can design, build and furnish dream houses using room templates to create a floor plan; traceable furniture shapes; and modular acrylic walls.

With KEVA Construct and Launch Sets, kids follow step-by-step blueprints to build a wrecking ball or catapult. Also available by KEVA is a Contraptions kit to build Rube Goldberg machines.

Solo players of Perplexis try to guide a ball through a winding 3-D maze encased in a see-through sphere. Beginner, intermediate and advanced versions are available.

Knot So Fast, as its name suggests, is a knot-tying game that tests spatial reasoning and manual dexterity. Players select a challenge card and race the timer and their opponents to tie various types of knots.

General recommendations: Percussive, string and other musical instruments; dominoes; building blocks, Legos and related toys; buildable courses for marbles, race cars, etc.; craft/art kits and supplies; age-appropriate hand tools; calligraphy kits; 3-D wooden puzzles; weaving looms; sewing kits; model cars, planes, etc.; robotics kits; maze games and puzzles; mosaic art.

Social/cooperative play

By interacting in play settings, children learn proper social behaviors such as sharing, reciprocity, cooperation and even moral reasoning.

Child development specialists classify multiplayer board games as social/cooperative play along with team sports, traditional playground games, interactive pretend games (playing house, etc.) and card games. These two games bring the family together while sharpening kids’ visual skills.

Q-bitz gives up to four players one wooden tray apiece along with 16 cubes. The objective is to be the first person to use the cubes to replicate a pattern on a card.

In the classic Jenga game, players try to remove blocks without toppling the structure. Pallina takes the concept further, involving sticks and balls suspended in a basket-like structure. (Picture a stiff basketball net.) Players pick a color and strategize how to remove matching sticks in order to drop their opponents’ balls but none of their own.

Fantasy/imaginative/dramatic play

Develops flexible and abstract thinking.

This type of play is sometimes aided by toys and props but often children don’t need them to engage in role play or pretend the sandbox contains deadly quicksand. This is the type of play in which a simple stick becomes a sword or a magic wand. I won’t make specific toy recommendations for this category but will leave you with this: It’s this type of play that so often makes kids ignore a shiny new toy in favor of the plain brown box it came in – and it’s fantastic!

Jeff Pinkerton
iCare for you.