If you want to buy toys for a child, anything age appropriate will do. If you want tools to aid in the development of real cognitive learning try to remember to keep it real. Let me develop some examples for us:

1. Take a piece of paper and a pencil and draw the best representation of an apple that you can in 5 seconds. Under your masterpiece, print in all capital letters the word "APPLE". How can we use this as our teaching tool? We can show that an apple is kind of round. We can indicate that the word that represents our drawing begins with the letter A. If we are a little further along in or alphabet we can go through the other letters in the word that represents our drawing. Remember children are very inquisitive, but have an attention span when they are young of about their age in minutes three to four years old is equivalent to 3 to 4 minutes of attention and then I want to see or do or hear something else. It may be something about our masterpiece drawing, but we need to keep things rolling along. Do some serious study of your drawing and ask yourself how long you think you can keep your child engaged in a learning manner.

2. Now take your nifty new cell phone, jump on the net and find a cool picture of a nice ripe, Mackintosh or Red Delicious apple. Show your screen to your child and let's see what we can learn about an apple. Like our masterpiece we can talk about round and we can introduce another aspect that this apple is red in color which opens up a whole new avenue of learning for us. It may not be too cool to use our cell to show our child this picture as there may be more gadget distractions on the phone so let's revise our step by going to our computer or plugging in our phone and printing off the picture we found, in color of course, let's print in all caps the word APPLE again. If our apple picture happens to have a stem and maybe a leaf on top we can also expand our learning into maybe other colors and words. Remember, we only get three to five minutes of talking time and then we want to move on.

3. Now go to your refrigerator and take out a nice red apple and set it on a piece of paper or a paper plate and print our magic word on the paper or plate. Now let's see what we can teach. First thing we learn is that in 1 and 2 above we lied, an apple isn't really round like a circle it is a sphere like a ball. Yup, it really is reddish and there may be a stem there on the top. Which is the top? Wonder what's on the bottom? Let's do something really neat-pick up the apple. What does the bottom look like? Where is the bottom from the top? What does an apple feel like? Is it smooth or rough? If we rub the apple on our shirt what happens, is it shiny or dull? I think we can get the picture, pun intended, if we get real with the things we use to teach our children. Another whole world that opens up with our apple is that after 3 to 5 minutes of words and language we can do something really neat. Take a plastic knife and help your child cut the apple in half. Here we go with cut, half, knife, how to use a knife only with help for awhile etc., what's inside an apple, how do we get new apples from the seeds, how long does that take which could get us into days, weeks and months. As long as your child is engaged our simple apple can lead us way up the road to learning. Oh yes, remember we also have the word on the plate APPLE, that's what an apple really is. It also becomes our snack for the time and guess what that leads us to? What's a good snack to have and on and on. Keep it real, it doesn't take a lot on money to help your child excel, just think about it.

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