More Than Play
BUSY BALL POPPER
The BUSY BALL POPPER’s bright, colorful balls and fun sound effects provide more than just exciting entertainment—they also help your child develop and reinforce valuable learning skills as he plays! This toy can help your child learn about his body, how it moves and what it is capable of. The visual, auditory and sensory elements of the BUSY BALL POPPER provide holistic learning for a young child. He has giggly fun, and you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping him learn and grow! Best of all, as your child grows, the BUSY BALL POPPER grows with him. When he is little, he’ll love to sit and try to catch the balls as they bounce by. Once he’s up on his feet, the Ball Popper offers a whole new experience of fun—he’ll be toddling and chasing after the balls that tumble out of the chute, helping to develop his gross motor skills.
It’s More Than Play... This Toy Also Teaches:
Eye Tracking
Temporal Awareness
Hand-Eye Coordination
Pincer Grip
Anticipation & Prediction
Object Permanence
Fundamental Movement Skills
Gross Motor Skills
Crawling
Spatial Awareness
Language
Problem Solving
Eye Tracking
When your baby is first born, he can’t see very far, and his eye movements can be random and uncoordinated. As your child grows, toys like the BUSY BALL POPPER, with its bright and cheery ball-popping action and silly sound effects, can help his eye movements become more fluid while he tracks the moving balls and chases after them in a frenzy of fun.
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Temporal Awareness
Being able to judge how fast a ball is traveling and then catching it successfully is a skill experts call temporal awareness. With the BUSY BALL POPPER, the balls just keep on coming, so your child can get plenty of practice improving his timing. Every time he plays, he’s figuring out how to anticipate and catch the balls as they bounce through the BUSY BALL POPPER. Temporal awareness is the same skill that he will need later when he’s up to bat in his first Little League game!
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Hand-Eye Coordination
As your young child reaches for the colorful balls and tries to catch them, he is working to develop his hand-eye coordination. He’s figuring out how to make his eyes and hands work together to grab the balls and drop them back into the BUSY BALL POPPER for more giggling good times. Hand-eye coordination is an important foundation skill that your child will continue building as he grows. It’s necessary for throwing, catching, doing puzzles and eventually even holding a pencil and writing!
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Pincer Grip
Once balls spill out of the BUSY BALL POPPER and onto the floor, it’s time to pick them up and drop them back in to start the fun again! Picking up objects and learning how to release them is a tricky task for little hands. When your child chases after the balls, he can learn to grasp them with his thumb and forefinger. Experts call picking objects up in this way using a “pincer grip,” and it’s the very same skill that baby is practicing when he picks up his toast and drops it over the side of his high chair. But the pincer grip isn’t all about silly stunts—as he gets older, a strong pincer grip will allow him to hold a spoon and feed himself.
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Anticipation & Prediction
As your child giggles with excitement, waiting for the balls to wind down the colorful chute and pop back out, he is beginning to develop anticipation and prediction skills. After watching a few repetitions, he will soon realize that once the ball starts rollicking and rolling down the slide, it won’t be long before it comes popping back out of the tower. Being able to anticipate and predict events can help children understand order and sequence. This is an important foundation for learning other skills later, like spelling.
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Object Permanence
When the bright, bouncing balls zip down the track and pop up into the tower, they disappear for a moment. “Where do they go? Are they still there?” As your child grows, he can start to understand that just because something disappears out of sight, it hasn’t necessarily gone away. He is learning about “object permanence.” Your child learns this when you play games like peek-a-boo together, and it is an important milestone in his development. The BUSY BALL POPPER can help your child grasp this idea as he learns that the balls may disappear, but they always return in a hopping, popping flurry of fun!
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Fundamental Movement Skills
Whether he’s rolling, crawling, walking or running to retrieve each breakaway ball, he’s practicing fundamental movement skills. Fundamental movement skills allow the body to move from one place to another. These physical skills develop from simple to complex, and require hours and hours of trial and error to master. With practice, early skills like crawling, walking and jumping develop into more advanced skills like hopping, skipping and leaping. The more active a child is, the more likely he is to develop strong fundamental movement skills.
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Gross Motor Skills
As your child picks up each poppin’ and droppin’ ball, he’s developing important muscles in his arms. These big muscle movements are known as gross motor skills, and they must be developed for children to learn more refined movements of the hands and fingers. Activities like picking up the colorful BUSY BALL POPPER balls encourage the use of large muscle groups and promote gross motor skill development.
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Crawling
When balls pop out of the tower and tumble over the side, your child will delight and want to get moving, crawling after the bouncing balls. As your little one navigates the wilds of the playroom floor, crawling over objects and around obstacles to chase the balls, he can observe differences in levels and start to develop an understanding of height and depth perception.
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Spatial Awareness
As your child chases the bouncing balls around the chair, over the rug and around the coffee table, he is beginning to learn the concept of spatial awareness. Children need to understand spatial awareness in order to move around without knocking into furniture or banging their heads. Good spatial awareness may help children run without bumping into things, color within the lines and leave spaces between words when they write.
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Language
The BUSY BALL POPPER comes complete with silly sound effects and eight lively songs to add to the fun! Music encourages the development of language skills because it helps children recognize different sounds and tones. Language is a complex skill that is learned and refined in many stages. First, children listen to and simulate sounds they hear. Imitating sounds teaches young children how to position their mouths, strengthens the muscles in their lips and face, and helps them hear the difference between sounds.
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Problem Solving
When your child first plays with the BUSY BALL POPPER, he may try to drop the plastic balls back into the funnel they pop out of. Because that’s where the air comes out, the balls pop right back out! This creates a tricky problem for children. “How do I get the ball to stay down? What happens if I block the hole with my hand? Where else can I put the ball?” Problem solving is an important acquisition for life—and it begins when playing. By allowing children to make their own decisions while playing, they begin to develop independent thinking and problem-solving skills, and begin to learn to understand the consequences—both positive and negative—of their choices. “If I put the ball in the funnel, it pops back out, but if I drop it in the chute, it goes right in!” It’s important for children to learn to think for themselves so they can start to make their own decisions as they grow older.
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Learn more—together!
Want to join the fun? Playing with your child can boost his learning, and it gives him more time to bond with you! Try these simple tips to enhance your child’s play experience:
- Help your little one learn his colors by naming them as the balls pop out. Then ask your child to drop in specific colored balls to reinforce his understanding.
- Ask your child to drop the balls in a certain sequence, such as red, yellow, then pink. You’ll be sharing quality time with your child as he learns through play.
