Last week in the first part of my answer I talked about improving motor/balance skills to better prepare your son for the demands that starting grade school might present.
Timocco currently has 16 games designed to improve a range of early learning abilities such as letter recognition, number recognition, mirror lettering, quantity perception, color identification, shape matching and whole-part perception. You can find these games by choosing ‘early learning’ in the skills filter, and while I’m not sure that we have enough space to cover them all here, below are a few of my favorite games which accelerate learning skills directly.
The “Memory Game” encourages kids to practice and learn letters, numbers, colors and shapes. The game also works visual memory, motor control, planning and spatial organization, and can be played with either one or two players.
The memory game is played like any other memory game; every turn the child chooses two cards with the goal of find matching pairs. The uniqueness of the Timocco memory game is the use of motor control needed to play the game. The child has to pick the cards using the colored balls; in order for the card to be picked, the child must place the ball on the chosen card. Every turn the player chooses two cards and continues to play until he/she finds all the pairs.
In the “Hot Air Balloons” game, the child allows the correct balloons to fly away by identifying the letter that they hear, finding the floating balloons with the correct letter and touching them using their avatar to set them free.
The Bubbles game works on recognition of numbers and visual attention skills. In this game the child hears and sees a number and must pop the bubbles containing that number. This game can also be played with mirrored numbers, where the child most pop the non-inversed numbers only and ignore the inversed or “mirror-image” numbers; a skill that children with reading difficulties tend to find challenging.
You could also try the “Puzzle” game, which works on perception of the whole and its parts, and numbers and quantities. In this game, pieces of the puzzle are presented to the child (each time a different number of pieces). When the child touches the blinking piece, it disappears, revealing a portion of the picture. When the whole picture is revealed, the child sees a big digit (the number corresponds to the number of puzzle pieces), and also, a corresponding number of cows grazing in the meadow; you can count them together with the child.
“Puzzle” helps kids understand the connection between digit and quantity, ‘big’ numbers and ‘small’ numbers, and encourages them to practice the different numbers they’ve learned, which could help your son be more prepared for the school year.
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