Dynamic Minds

Toddler Learning Toys - Learning Toys for Kids

Kids love to play!  Here are the best learning toys for kids or toddler learning toys that one can have at home and in school.

BLOCKS. As toddlers begin to develop their fine motor skills (i.e using their hands and fingers to grasp objects), blocks provide a wonderful way of teaching many concepts like colors, balance, coordination, imagination and creativity among others.

Toddlers especially love making tall towers and toppling it down.  They would always giggle when I would make funny sounds.  They can do this repeatedly too.

There are many different kinds of blocks that you will find in the toy stores.  Some blocks are plastics while others are wooden.  We both have plastic and wooden blocks. The plastic blocks that the kids are playing in the photo (right photo above) are colorful.  They are easy to stack and hold because they are just square shapes.

Another type of blocks is the one that allows children to form things that they can imagine.  A house, a toy car, a bridge, an airplane.   The Lego Toy is an example of this.  But for toddlers, you must acquire the big pieces for safety reasons.  Small pieces may find their way into your kids mouth easily.  Buy the big blocks for toddlers.  We also place the blocks in a colorful basket and let the kids pick from the basket  (left photo above).

Remember those wooden blocks with letters and numbers placed in a wagon?  These blocks are often used to introduce these concepts to young children.

Whether plastic or wooden blocks, just allow the kids to enjoy and use these toys to learn while playing.  Don’t be impatient if they can’t name the letters or numbers yet.  Familiarization is the key.

SHAPE SORTERS: Another learning toy for kids are the shape sorters.   Shape sorters come in different containers.  One thing you must remember is to start off with basic shapes.   Basic shapes are circle, square and triangle.

What children can learn from using shape sorters:  As they play and insert the different shapes into the correct hole, they are learning eye-hand coordination, the concepts of shapes and even the colors of the shapes too!  After, they can move on to more complex shapes like star, octagon, hexagon, clover and so on.  Aside from these type of shape sorters found above in the photos, there are also what you call shape insets.  They look like puzzles where the child can still fit the correct shape into the space provided for.

STACKING TOYS: Stacking toys like these are also great educational toys for toddlers.  This is a self correcting toy so your child can learn about the concept of sizes (from the biggest to the smallest) and which size goes first to complete the set.

As you can see, there are many things one can learn from educational toys.  As your toddler begins to learn about his world around him, knowing what your child will learn from each toy will make you appreciate the learning toys for kids available around.