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What skills can children practice with seek-and-find books?

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What skills can children practice with seek-and-find books?

Kids love search-and-find books, and early childhood educators love them too. While all books are great for teaching kids to read, the interactive nature of a seek-and-find book adds an extra element of play to the learning process. In addition to helping kids practice reading, these books are an interactive experience that help kids learn the skills they need to solve problems, create their own stories, and much more.

Learning shapes and colors

The real challenge in search-and-find books is picking out the character you’re looking for in a visually busy image. The only way to do it successfully is to be able to visually identify the character by their appearance. That means kids need to be able to understand and articulate the color of a character’s hair, the pattern on their shirt, the expression on their face, and more.

As kids learn more about shapes and colors, they’ll get faster at successfully identifying characters in the middle of chaotic scenes.

 

Practice remembering details and instructions

Yes, memory is a skill that needs practice! When a child searches for a particular character on the page, they’re exercising their memory of what that character looks like. They’re practicing holding onto what they know about a character’s hair, clothing, expression, and more. Kids returning to a much-loved book may also begin to retain information about where their favorite characters are on the page. They can practice finding their favorite scenes.

Our LEGO seek-and-find books also include activities that strengthen memory like comparison puzzles. By looking for differences in two similar images, kids have to hold a memory in their minds of what the original page looked like. Although it seems like a simple activity, it’s actually a complicated test of noticing, storing, and recalling details.

 

Creativity and storytelling

The busy worlds on the pages of seek-and-find books can tell complex stories without using any text at all. Instead of just reading words on a page to your child, you can ask your child to be the one who tells the story to you. What are the construction workers building in LEGO City? How do the skeletons like to spend their time in the Secret Dimension? What are the students studying in the Hogwarts library?

Imagining and telling stories is a vital part of early childhood development. Through storytelling, children practice solving complex problems. They learn to put themselves in the shoes of people in different situations and develop empathy for others. They build verbal skills by communicating their ideas. Most importantly, they develop a sense of curiosity about the way the world works, and learn to create narratives that put what they learn into practice.