Check out our new playability service
The Treasure Island Playability Service has hit the web and provides you with the information you need to make informed decisions about your toy purchases. We're keen to add value through our website and offer services that your traditional bricks and mortar shops can't.
Treasure Island Toys is proud to present our newest initiative... The Treasure Island Toys Playability Service (TIPS) for parents.
The purpose of this initiative is to get parents to play with their children more. It is known that due to the stresses of modern day life, parents are finding it much harder to find the time to spend playing with their children, due to long working hours, commuting journeys and other commitments.
Only a very small percentage of parents find the time to spend just an hour a day playing with their children. This is a very sad statistic, considering that the figure was over 80% back in the 1980’s.
Children need to be able to play in order to develop different skills for later life, and you as a parent are your child’s best playmate.
For the initiative we have divided different types of play into different categories, explaining how each category is beneficial to a child’s development and growth. Within each play category are different age ranges, with examples of the types of play that a child should be experiencing within each age group.
The different categories for the types of play that we have recognised are as follows:
Creative Play – Creative play involves types of play such as acting, drawing, painting and other s that enable your child to be creative and be in charge of their own little world for a while.
Manipulation Play – Manipulation play is all about your child’s senses, the toys in this category are used to stimulate and refine a child’s mobility skill and senses. Hand-Eye co-ordination, textures, sounds etc...
Physical Play – Physical play involves a large range of play that enables your child to become active, this involves sit and ride toys, play tunnels, climbing frames etc... This is a very important part of play as regular physical play from an early age can reduce the risk of heart and circulatory disease in later life, as well as prevent obesity which can reduce a child’s self esteem.
Role Play – Role play is a type of play that enables a child to use their imagination, by pretending to do household chores like mummy and daddy, pretending to be doctors and nurses, chef’s, craftsmen and any other profession that you can think of. This type of play encourages the development of all kinds of skills that a child will use every day, including: Social skills, emotional skills, sharing skills, self confidence and a feeling of security and language and communication skills.
Cognitive Development – Cognitive Development involves types of play that develop the brain, including shape sorters, memory games, telling the time etc...
The TIPS service has been integrated throughout the Treasure Island Toys website. You can read in more detail about the playability service and the different types of play by ‘clicking here’ or clicking on the yellow ‘Playability’ link on the toolbar at the bottom of your web browser.
The playability toolbar has been designed to enable you to easily find toys for a specific age group that are beneficial to each kind of play. Simply select an age group from the drop down, tick the box relevant to the type of play that you are looking to purchase for and click on ‘Find Toys’. This will bring back results related to your search.
You can then click through to a product that looks interesting to you and on the main product image, a hover over will appear displaying icons relating to which playability category that the particular toy is in. You can then click on these icons to read more detailed information about the playability type/age group that this toy falls under.
We hope that parents will find the Treasure Island Playability Service of great use when selecting a new toy for their children or a gift for others, but this part of the service is only the tip of the iceberg. We are looking to roll out a national scheme in the very near future, so keep checking the news pages for information on our upcoming plans.
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