Toy Theater Review for Teachers

What is Toy Theater? It is a collection of interactive educational games for your elementary classroom. If you are an elementary school teacher and you need interactive educational games for your students, you are able to use Toy Theater.

The games which are provided in the Toy Theater site are all free and they are designed to work on desktop computers, mobile devices and tablets.

Toy Theater Review for Teachers

On Toy Theater, there are math games which will teach students about the fundamentals that they have to learn such as addition, counting, subtraction, division, multiplication and many more. There are also multiple hard to find graphing games such as pictographs, line plots, and pie charts. The games are original and they are developed explicitly to guarantee that the game integrates learning with fun as explained on the Toy Theater site.

Not only math, there are also reading games which include multiple hidden pictures, spelling and word search games. The site also provides a number of online books which are free to access such as a series of Beatrix Potters stories and original Toy Theater stories as well.

Your students can also enjoy art activities where those have been proven useful for many classroom lesson plans, not only in art and design but also in math. In the Art Activities which are offered by Toy Theater, students are permitted to explore design while learning about symmetry and balance or play with drawing tools, online painting and coloring games or even scribble away with a lot of doodle pads.

What else? Toy Theater offers worksheets and printables at Class Playground where each page offers summaries which are easy to read about the most commonly taught subjects, concepts, and teaching tools which are used in the elementary classroom.

Toy Theater Review for Teachers'

How Teachers Can Teach with Toy Theater?

With Toy Theater, teachers can spend some time browsing what is available and then choose games that can be suitable for the material which is being discussed in class. After that, teachers are able to direct students to specific games for practice. If the teachers want, they can also let students browse by themselves. However, it is important to note that there are some games which are a bit complex and offer only a brief text explanation.

In the Toy Theater, teachers are able to find some teacher tools which can be useful such as pre-made math quizzes. However, note that there is no room for customization. It means that teachers need to make sure that they line up well enough to be worthwhile. Also, In Toy Theater, there is no way to create user accounts or track performance over time which means that teachers have to make a report before going on to the next student or moving on to another game as explained on the Common Senses site.

The Content in Toy Theater

If you access the Toy Theater site, you will find that there are some menus at the top of the site including Math, Read, Art, Music, Puzzle, game and Teacher Tools.

    • Teacher Tools
      In the Teacher Tools page, you are able to find a collection of interactive manipulatives and assessment tools to illustrate and assess basic math concepts such as subtraction, addition, division, multiplication, and probability. Some of the virtual manipulative games on that site are Marble Jar, Geoboard, Geoboard Shape, Fraction Strips, Decimal Strips, Percentage Strips, Fraction Bars, Fraction Circles, Area Perimeter Explorer, Time, Stopwatch, Classroom Timer, Spinner, Dice, Coin Flip, Interactive Clock, Calculator, Place Value Chart and many more. Assessments which are available there are Math Flash Cards, Math test, Five Frame, Five Frame Equation, Ten Frame, Ten Frame Equation, and Fraction Addition Visualizer.
    • In Math page, you are able to find a lot of math games such as Basketball, Fruit Fall, Balloon Pop, Inch Worm, Subitizing Seeds, Fishing, Bingo, Bowling, Cowboy, Apple Island, Kayak, Feed Freddy, Shake and Spill, Popcorn, Math Flash Cards, Space Race, Touchdown, Connect, Counting Crops and many more. For example, you play Basketball game. First, you have to shoot the ball at the hoop by selecting the basketball and drag to shoot at the hoop. After that, you will be given a multiplication question that you have to answer.
    • Read
      In Read page, there are a lot of games related to the ability of reading such as Feed Freddy, Alphabetical Order, Alphabet Bridge, Word Bird, Magic Spell, Word Mine, Type, Time Playground Stone, Hidden Picture Beach, Hidden Picture Dragon, Word Scramble Food, Word Scramble Garage Sale, Word Search, Phonics Bug, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny by Beatrix Potter, Lead Line, Word Family Flashcards, and many more. These games can help the students to read, spell, learn, and write well.
    • Art
      In the Art page, you are able to find a lot of art games such as Cube, Build, Spin, Snowflake, Toy Form, Sticker, Spiral, Quilt, Mirror, Twirl, Polygon, Rose, Doodle Pad, Doodle Fruit Vegetable Alphabet and many more. These games can help students to express their own creativity and also develop visual learning skills, abstract idea expression, decision making, mathematical and scientific intuition, cultural awareness, and problem solving.
    • Music
      In the Music page, there are some music games such as Beat Box, Music Box, Composer, Piano C Major, Piano and Xylophone.
    • Puzzle
      In the Puzzle page, there are puzzle games such as Maze, Parking, Hexagon Fall, Gummy Blocks, Visual Memory, Animal Slider, Escape, Memory, Flowers, Stack, Sudoku, Nonogram, Different, Disguise, Pieces, Slider, Find and Sliding Squares. These puzzles can teach them to develop their abilities in problem solving, memory, spatial reasoning, deduction, persistence and more.
    • Games
      In the Games page, there are a number of games that can be played by students such as Space Miner, Checkers, Chess, Quest, Miniature Golf Game, Backgammon, Hercules, Reversi, Line, Tic Tac Toe, Snakes and Ladders, Space Pinball, Goose Game, Four Colors, Mini Golf World, Going Nuts, Darts and Nine Mens Morris. Graphics and fun games such as Hercules, Goose Game, and 4 Colors can teach the students about building skills in numeracy.