As a technology & Learning contributor who focuses on free and low-cost technology tools for teachers, I was intrigued when I came across the Toy Theater website. Founder Joel Gaspard is an artist, designer, and developer who began creating games for children early in his career.
“After art school I worked as an animator making educational CD-ROMs for children, which were created primarily for 'edutainment,'” explains Gaspard. “I thought things could be done better if the only focus of interactive work was the educational aspect. worth.”
With this educational goal in mind, Gaspard studied the work of teachers, including John A. Van de Walle and Marilyn Burns, to explore how the interactive medium could provide activities to complement primary education.
“Interactivity is about giving the user a role to play, making their decisions matter, and that is attractive to any audience,” he says.
WHAT IS TOY THEATER?
toy theater is a website that offers online educational games designed for elementary students and available through any desktop computer, tablet, or mobile device. The games are organized by themes, including math, reading, art, music, puzzles, and classic games. It's important to note that although K-6 students are the primary consumers of Toy Theatre, many of the creative games are likely to appeal to older children and even adults.
The website offers a clean, colorful interface that's easy to navigate, with a home page featuring a selection of the most popular games, as well as a search bar and themes menu.
The games are accompanied by complete user guides in most cases and have the option to go full screen and mute the sound.
WHAT ARE THE BEST FEATURES OF THE TOY THEATER?
Guidelines for teachers
The variety of educational games on offer can be a little daunting for teachers. “How to start?” one might ask. Fortunately, almost all activities, no matter how simple, are accompanied by thoughtful ideas for using them in the classroom, as well as a summary of the skills to develop when using them.
Toy Theater teacher tools include a wide variety of interactive elements that allow teachers to teach and assess basic math and literacy concepts. Virtual manipulatives are a great way for children to learn and practice concepts that may be difficult to understand in a textbook.
For example, fractions, decimals, and percentages can seem abstract and remote. But these basic number concepts come to life with colorful strips that children drag and drop, creating a powerful visual representation.
Virtual construction games
The impressive 3D capabilities of Toy Theater interactives are shown in their super attractive and creative design. virtual building block games. Users select a set of objects based on a theme (such as ancient Greece, dinosaurs, or robots) and then employ a series of buttons to build, paint, and rotate or move in two and three dimensions. Other controls allow users to zoom, copy and save.
These games are a great combination of creativity, history, technology, and spatial skills that kids will enjoy playing while learning.
Composer
With Composer, kids drag and drop basic musical notation elements into a treble clef, then press play to hear their work. Within the fairly simple interface, users will find notes from 1/16 to whole; natural, crisp and flat symbols; and rest from 1/16 to the total.
Children don't need to have any musical knowledge to enjoy experimenting with this tool. At the same time, it serves as an excellent vehicle for young students to practice learning music reading and composition.
HOW DO TEACHERS USE TOY THEATER WITH THEIR STUDENTS?
Founded in 2001, Toy Theater has grown to host more than one million patrons annually. Some educators have come up with unique and unexpected ways to use the platform.
“For example, a professor in New Jersey used our building block activity to teach their kindergarteners an early introduction to computer-aided design (CAD),” Gaspard says. “Another used our artistic animation station in their STEM lab to demonstrate their learning about the phases of the moon.”
Gaspard adds: “Our social media pages are packed with creative ways teachers around the world are using our activities along with easy use of the many tools available to help teachers cover lesson plans. Our social media page instagram has a large following of speech pathologists who also use our tools to help support the work they do with children.”
When Gaspard and his Toy Theater staff visited real-life classrooms, the enthusiastic response was gratifying.
“We've seen firsthand almost an entire class of second graders fly through the air eagerly wanting to show off all the combinations of numbers and operators they can use to solve a number in our broken calculator game“, says.
HOW MUCH DOES THE TOY THEATER COST?
All Toy Theater games and tools are free to use without needing an account. As with many free platforms, Toy Theater is supported by advertising.
“We use Google Adsense as an advertising partner,” says Gaspard. “Within Adsense there is an option to block sensitive categories and we have blocked them all.” Gaspard confirms that tracking is also blocked; The ads shown are based solely on the content of the page.
For those who want premium features, the membership option offers a number of useful upgrades. Teachers can create up to fifty pages to organize their own library of games and activities, control students' category views, and connect up to 30 devices with a single access code. Membership subscription costs. $12 monthly and can be canceled at any time.