More Than Play
FORM FITTER
As your child pushes each colorful shape into the corresponding FORM FITTER hole, she is finding fun in making the shapes fit and disappear through the hole. The FORM FITTER’s stackable shapes and textured sides provide pleasant play experiences while helping your child learn all about size, shape, surface and colors. Your child can also discover that just as each star, circle or square only fits into one particular hole on the FORM FITTER, her own little body can only squeeze into certain places in her house.
It’s More Than Play... This Toy Also Teaches:
Visual Discrimination
Spatial Awareness
Pincer Grip
Hand-Eye Coordination
Problem Solving
Fine Motor Skills
Tactile Play
Object Permanence
Visual Discrimination
As your child plays with the FORM FITTER’s brightly colored shapes, she is learning which look different and which look the same. Learning to spot similarities and differences is very important as children learn to identify new objects and people. It also helps children learn to categorize items. For example, dogs come in all sizes and shapes, but they are still all dogs. Playing with the FORM FITTER allows children to explore similarities, differences and categories. Perhaps she’ll group all of the red blocks together or all of the triangles. Being able to see variation in shapes, directions and sizes is an important foundational skill for spelling and reading. Children need to be able to spot the differences between different letters and cases, such as “B” and “b,” and realize that they are the same letter, in order to learn to read and spell.
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Spatial Awareness
Every time your child crawls under the coffee table, squeezes under the sofa or angles herself under an armchair, she is learning about her body. “How big am I? Can I fit under here? Will I be able to get out?” Understanding how much space something takes up is called “spatial awareness.” Spatial awareness is the skill that allows your child to understand how much food will fit in her mouth, or to crawl under the coffee table without bumping her head. The FORM FITTER can encourage this skill by having your child repeatedly practice fitting blocks into corresponding cutouts, teaching her to recognize shapes and sizes and demonstrating that turning objects can make them fit more easily. Spatial awareness is also about understanding direction, positioning and “constancy.” Constancy is the idea that if something is turned, it is the same shape, even though it looks different. “Will this spoon fit in my mouth if I turn it upside down? What if I put it in backward?” Good spatial awareness can help children with more complex skills, like coloring inside the lines and leaving spaces between words when they write.
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Pincer Grip
Grasping each of the nine bright shapes and dropping them into the FORM FITTER can help your child develop her “pincer grip.” The development of the pincer grip is a major fine motor skill milestone. While young children often grab items clumsily with their entire hand, using a pincer grip helps your child learn that sometimes it’s easier to use individual fingers to move and maneuver objects. This is the same skill your child is building on when she picks up tiny pieces of cereal and drops them into her mouth. Using the pincer grip can also help her strengthen her thumb and forefinger—the same fingers she will use to hold and move a pencil when she gets older.
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Hand-Eye Coordination
Coordinating the hands and eyes to work together, or “hand-eye coordination,” is a skill that takes a lot of practice and refining. Good hand-eye coordination is a critical foundation skill—it is necessary for success in tasks as diverse as painting and hitting a ball with a bat.
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Problem Solving
As your child plays with the FORM FITTER, she’s going to face some difficult dilemmas. “If the square block doesn’t fit in the hole for the circle, how do I get it inside the FORM FITTER?” Problem solving is an important life skill—and it begins to develop during play. Play allows children to make their own decisions, develop independent thinking skills and begin to understand the consequences of their choices. “If I try to fit the square block in the circle hole, it won’t move. I can try another hole, or try to open the whole side instead!”
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Fine Motor Skills
Every time your child carefully lines up the FORM FITTER’s plastic stars, circles or squares with the matching window, she’s practicing fine motor skills. Fine motor skills are the small, refined muscle movements needed to perform delicate tasks. In order to develop these skills, children need to build strong finger muscles and experience lots of different surfaces and textures. Fine motor skills are used for many everyday tasks, like putting beads on a string, peeling a banana or pulling up a zipper.
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Tactile Play
Your child’s skin contains millions of sensory receptors, allowing her to experience and learn about the world through texture and sensation. As your child touches the bumpy, smooth, slippery and rough surfaces of the FORM FITTER, she can learn that different objects feel different on her fingers. The experience of different textures on the skin sends information back to the brain. The brain remembers what the surface feels like and when it has that same feeling again, finds it easier to understand, as the sensory information has already been recorded. This helps children integrate sensory information. Feeling and experiencing different textures provides a foundation for developing fine motor skills later on.
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Object Permanence
When your child puts the right shape in the right hole, it drops through and disappears! “Where did it go? Is it still there? If I shake the FORM FITTER, will I hear the shape inside?” As your child has more of these experiences, she starts to understand that just because something disappears out of sight, that doesn’t mean it is gone forever. An understanding of object permanence is the same skill that helps her understand that even though you left the room, you still exist and will eventually return!
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Learn more—together!
Want to join the fun? Playing with your child can boost his learning, and it gives him more time to bond with you! Try these simple tips to enhance your child’s play experience:
- As your child picks up a shape, tell her its name and color. Ask her to repeat it after you.
- Ask your child to match each shape with another shape of the same color.
- Tell your child to touch each side of the FORM FITTER and describe each surface. How does it feel? Is it smooth and slippery or rough and bumpy? Do two sides feel different or the same?
- Hold two shapes that are different. Ask your child how they are the different.
