Sensory play is integral for child development.

From birth, babies and children naturally engage their five senses to explore the world. Many of our favorite memories are in fact tied to these senses: the sound of a favorite song might trigger a flashback to your childhood, or the feeling of a recorder might bring back memories of elementary school music classes.

Using their senses is crucial for children to develop nerve connections to the brain’s pathways and create stronger connections when processing information.

Some benefits of tactile play include:

• cognitive skills

• fine and gross motor skills

• problem solving skills

NumberBLOX focuses on developing STEAM and analytical skills with an emphasis on tactile play.

Tactile play engages multiple areas of our brain to unlock the most powerful form of learning. For example, working with symbols, such as numbers, uses one section of the brain. Meanwhile, working with visual and spatial information, such as an array of dots, uses another. Through NumberBLOX, children can optimize mathematics learning and performance by communicating between these two sections of the brain.

Ultimately, NumberBLOX’s tactile engraved pips allow children to truly get a feel for the numbers they’re working with. For example, rather than simply memorizing that 7 * 8 = 56, students learn to think outside the box and subtract two 7s from 10*7 to get the same number. With the help of tools like NumberBLOX, children begin to contextualize math to their own understanding.