The Purpose of Play

Play: Benefits of Children's Toys

When children play, they’re doing more than having fun – they’re learning and growing! Physical fun unlocks their imagination and give them tools to invent the future! As your local Bloomington-Normal educational toy store, Gingerbread House Toys carries what your family is looking for to encourage your kids to keep going so they keep growing!

Read on to discover all of the benefits of playtime, then stop by the store and our energetic staff can help you find the perfect one!

Creative Abilities

Creativity is what we call having fun with our minds. By using our imagination to pretend and by painting, building, and signing, we discover new ways to think about things and express ourselves.

Cognitive Abilities

Cognitive abilities are what help us learn about the world around us. We use memory, reasoning and problem-solving to take what we know and apply it to today's play in the sandbox.

Gross Motor Skills

There's nothing "icky" about gross motor skills. These are the actions related to larger muscles, like our arms and legs. When we walk, run and jump, we're using gross motor skills for balance and coordination.

Emotional Skills

Our emotional responses are the ways we react to situations we encounter in life. Whether we are happy or sad, surprised or mad, we must learn to control our emotions and express ourselves clearly to others.

Social Skills

Playing nicely with each other is what we call social development. Sharing, cooperating and taking turns all fall into this category, and are qualities that make people want to be our friend.

Spatial Reasoning

This is how we understand and recognize the position of objects in relation to each other. Spatial reasoning is important to excel in things like reading a map and doing a geometry problem.

Fine Motor Skills

For activities like drawing, grasping objects and using some tools, we use our fine motor skills. Our smaller muscles, like fingers, toes and eyes, are necessary for mastering hand-eye coordination and picking up sensory skills.

Language Skills

Our eyes, ears, voices and hands all play important roles in sharing what's on our mind and understanding what others are trying to tell us. As children grow up, they'll also read and write to communicate and learn about their world.