The Effects of Educational Toys : Visual Perception Skills and more...

THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATIONAL TOYS

Children begin to realize their surroundings around the months after birth and spend most of their time trying to get to know the surroundings. The pre-school period is the period when children tend to satisfy their curiosity, research, study and discovery. Children use their senses effectively to realize these tendencies. Seeing the object, hearing the sound, touching, tasting and knowledge of the object is also very effective. Human uses the perception to understand, interpret and adapt itself to new situations by using their senses throughout life from birth. Perception is a cognitive process and can be defined as meaningful to the stimuli that come to the eye, ear and other receptors. The purpose of perception is to match the information obtained by the senses with some cognitive elements and to understand the facts in the universe. Perception senses other senses from the brain sensory organs, including social and cultural factors to evaluate. Selecting the incoming senses, neglecting some of them, strengthening some of them, filling the gaps in between and making meaning according to expectations are made at this stage. Perception is a complex process affected by past learning and experience. Visualization can be defined as the ability to describe, transform, generalize, explain, prove and reflect visual information. Visual perception processes are the process of perceiving and processing visual information from sensory and mental processes.

In children, the ability to visual perception is a developing process. Visual perception skills develop rapidly in early childhood and approach the adult level at the age of eleven to twelve. Visual perception skills of children until the age of nine became evident. Figure-on-ground perception in children shows a rapid development between the ages of three and five, fixed between the ages of eight and ten, location perception in the space completes development between the ages of seven and nine, the ability to shape stability shows a rapid development between the ages of six and seven, between the ages of eight and nine the more complex spatial relationships in children continue to develop throughout childhood, and at the age of ten come into adulthood. Educational activities and daily life skills require a combination of vision, visual perception and visual motor skills.

According to Scheiman, visual perception includes the ability to interpret, understand and define the visual information that comes to the individual. According to Frostig, visual perception is the ability to recognize, distinguish visual stimuli and interpret them in relation to previous experiences. Visual perception of visual perception, visual discrimination, visual-spatial relations, visual memory, right-left direction determination, interpretation of visual objects are known. Frostig examined visual perception by dividing it into five sub-areas: eye-motor coordination, shape-ground separation, shape constancy, perception of location in space, and perception of spatial relations. The reason why Frostig divides visual perception into these five areas is the lack of these subfields in clinical studies conducted with individuals with learning disabilities. Eye-motor coordination is the ability to see, coordinate with the body's movements and parts of the body. In this area, the task of the child is to draw straight in narrowed borders and on the curved path. Figure-ground separation; it is defined as sensing and thinking on it, focusing and attention on the stimulus chosen from among many stimuli. In this area, children are asked to separate the intersecting figures. The shape constancy task is to find squares and circles from other shapes on the page. The other area is tested to find a figure that is reversed or rotated by the child in order to perceive the location in the space. In the perception of spatial relations, the child is expected to combine the points connecting the same figures. Bargara states that the visual abilities, visual speed and accuracy of children can be increased by systematic and serial education programs applied to children with low visual perception skills. There are activities to support the visual perception development of their children in pre-school education. One of these activities is educational toys. Educational toys are toys that help children learn by playing, develop concepts, better understand objects and events, that is, children's mental development. Children, by means of educational toys, establish relationships between events and objects such as cause-effect, similarity, part-whole, or form-distinguish them by sorting and grouping them according to a certain feature or order, hand-eye coordination, mental development, small develops skills such as muscle development perception, problem solving, comparison, mind-keeping, decision-making, similarity and differences in mind, resuscitation. In early childhood, it is useful for the child to use educational toys to support cognitive skills such as using symbols, sensing, creating new concepts, and all their development. Visual perception skills help children to read, write, spell, improve their mathematical skills, and help them develop all of the other skills they need to succeed in school. The shortcomings of visual perception can negatively affect children's daily activities and skills such as writing and drawing which require hand manipulation. In addition, the lack of visual perception can negatively affect mathematics and literacy skills. Therefore, the effect of the education given to the visual perception skills of 6 year-old children attending pre-school education on the visual perception skills of educational toys was investigated.

   In the research, it was found that the visual perception education given with the educational toys prepared for the visual perception education positively influenced the children's Frostig developmental visual perception sub-areas. It is suggested that the lack of visual perception will adversely affect the literacy and math skills of children in primary education, and it is recommended that studies to improve the visual perception in preschool period should be extended. The most important limitation of this research is the participation of children in the six age group, pre-school education and middle socio-cultural level and the narrow sample group to the education and examining their visual perceptions. For this reason, it is recommended that different educational groups should be trained on different socio-cultural level, children who have not received pre-school education and larger sample group and comparing visual perception skills. The pre-school education teachers should be aware of the issues to be considered when choosing educational toys and seminars about visual perception development. Based on the developed educational toys for visual perception skills, educational toys for this area can be developed and shared with pre-school teachers. May be you wanna to read the other articles.