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Omagles are possibly the best toy to help children develop their imagination and creativity because they encourage a type of play known in the developmental psychology community as “Free Play.”
What is free play?
Free play is the type of game that does not have general rules like football or baseball have. Children have to make up their own rules and become more creative. Studies have shown that if you take two groups of children, where one group is playing a game with some pre-existing rules, and the other is “free-playing”, the free-playing group will score MUCH higher on creativity assessments.
A great must read article on this topic was published by Scientific American Mind called The Serious Need For Play. It is definitely worth reading. You can find it by doing a Google search.
How can Omagles help encourage free play?
The Omagles are a construction tool that allows children to build almost anything, as you can see from some examples taken from their instruction manual.
During my own childhood, I sold my first glass of lemonade from a lemonade cart I made out of Omagles. My brother built his first stage that he performed on (now he’s a professional magician for the Ringling Brothers). And we even built a replica of the old Gladiator challenge and obstacle course.
Basically, the opportunities are endless.
Whether you have a little “princess” who wants to build a castle, with a drawbridge, and then make her little brother go wrong… Knight in shining armor protects from the evil dragon… or build racing cars to compete . down a hill, or a thousand other ideas, Omagles gives his son the basis to create everything.
Omagles are the truly perfect toy for Free Play.
They’re not the cheapest toy out there, but they’ll outlast any battery-powered fad for generations. In fact, I still have my set of Omagles that I had as a kid and just pulled them out of my mom’s garage yesterday to show off to my son. And even at 2 1/2 he completely captivated him for almost 2 hours while his little brain worked building all sorts of things.
The only downside to Omagles is that they are a bit hard to find. You can find some on eBay from time to time, but I also recommend checking out the omagels site as they seem to have slightly better prices.
Whether you’re looking for the next hit Christmas present or your child has an upcoming birthday, I promise they’ll love a set or two of Omagles. You will never get more for your money than these toys will give you…and I think just about every other kid who had Omagles growing up would tell you the same thing.
Go get some… no seriously, why haven’t you gone get them yet? 😉
Other resources to develop creativity
If you really want to do everything possible to develop your child’s creativity, I recommend that you do two things…
1. Watch Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted video on how we’re screwing up creativity in our youth.
2. Download my free report, Unlocking Your Child’s Full Potential for 6 Mindprinting Strategies for Child Development