Research studies show that playing with your child and encouraging them to be creative is fantastic for their early years development. Creativity is all about bringing together different ideas to make something new - think of how a great architect takes inspiration from structures in the natural world. In The Land of Me, every chapter helps children combine different elements to make something new.
— Read more about the research
Playing together is the best way to boost childrens' development. The secret is to gently encourage children to communicate about what they're thinking and feeling, and to help develop their ideas. In the academic community we call it 'Sustained Shared Thinking', and research shows that it can significantly boost children's future achievements at school.
The Land of Me is the first early years product that purposefully helps you with this. A window suggests ideas and questions to ask your child as you play — open questions that are designed to encourage children to think about their answers. It's a real first.
Each chapter in The Land of Me covers a different area of learning, drawn from the national guidelines for pre-school education. There's everything from discovering the world around them and making things through to creating songs and dances.
People understandably worry about children spending too much time on computers, so it's easy to think that we shouldn't be encouraging under 5s to use them. But there's nothing fundamentally bad about computers. In fact, they offer the flexibility to be great creative learning environments for pre-schoolers. Where else can children create animals, buildings, boats, songs, dances, masks and more, all in one place?
As children grow they start to grasp the concept of one thing representing another. It starts with waving around a wooden block and pretending it's an aeroplane and ends with them recognising the numbers and the letters of the alphabet, and later in learning basic arithmetic and reading and writing whole words.
The middle point on this journey is using visual symbols, and it's vital for helping children progress. That's why every chapter in The Land of Me asks children to make choices with symbols.
A title bar also appears to describe what you've created together. Typing in different words actually changes what you've created on screen. For example, type "cold" instead of "hot" and suddenly our characters are marching through the snow. It's great fun, and children start to enjoy using words. They'll also learn some new vocabulary.
Dr. John Siraj-Blatchford is an honorary Professor at the University of Swansea Centre for Child Research.
His extensive research in early childhood education has been conducted over 18 years through his previous posts at Westminster College in Oxford, the University of Durham, the University of Cambridge, and the University of London Institute of Education.
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