Learning through play is essential for both kids’ mental and physical development. Through playing, kids can learn and practice essential skills like problem-solving, cause and effect, and hand-eye coordination.
Also, playing teaches kids about sharing and the environment around them and enhances their gross and fine motor skills. Therefore, good educational toys for toddlers are essential if you would like to support your kids’ development during their early childhood. Luckily, through this blog, you will discover the top educational toys for toddlers. Off we go!
During early childhood, kids experience huge intellectual, mental, emotional, and social changes that will help them learn about the world around them. At the ages of 1 to 3, toddlers start following two or three-step directions, using their color recognition and categorization skills and moving around more.
During this developmental stage, kids need to be supported with good educational toys for toddlers to help them complete their developmental milestones efficiently and improve their mental and physical skills.
Let’s discover our list to learn more about top-rated educational toys for toddlers!
This cute hedgehog learning toy is one of the best educational toys for toddlers. The toy includes a 2-piece hedgehog and 12 accessories that are just the right size for toddlers' hands to hold.
This learning toy is a good alternative for open-ended play. As one of the best toys for toddlers, this hedgehog toy improves kids' logical thinking, counting, color recognition, sorting, and gross and fine motor skills.
MentalUP is a safe and beneficial resource for turning any laptop, computer, or tablet into educational toys for toddlers. With MentalUP, which is one of the best toddler apps, you can both support your kid's cognitive skills and keep them entertained while helping them practice their core skills.
The MentalUP app is designed with an academic approach to provide kids with entertaining and scientific games and activities in a safe learning environment.
The app includes age-appropriate games and activities to enhance kids' essential cognitive skills like problem-solving, logical thinking, concentration, creativity, visual intelligence, attention, focusing, analytical thinking, and many more.
The multi-awarded app MentalUP enables parents to track their kid’s cognitive progress with its rich reporting modules and provides children with suitable games, activities, riddles, puzzles, and exercises. 🏆
You can download MentalUP right now to discover 150+ brain games and 240+ fitness exercises that are appropriate for enhancing your kid’s cognitive skills! 🎉
This is one of the most simple yet educational toys for toddlers age 1 to 3. This building toy includes 80 pieces of brightly colored building blocks in different shapes, colors, and sizes.
This building toy promotes open-ended and imaginative play and improves kids’ creativity, shape, and color recognition skills, as well as gross and fine motor skills.
Playing with these kinds of building toys can empower your kid's spatial reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and divergent thinking skills. Plus, the Mega Bloks building toy can be easily stored when playtime is over.
This baby bongo is one of the most entertaining educational music toys for toddlers. The learning toy is best for sparking kids' musical interest and helping them get familiar with musical rhythms.
Beat Bop Baby Bonga both includes animal and instrumental sounds. With its flashing lights and fun rhythms, it keeps kids entertained while helping them practice their hand-eye coordination, creativity, and musical and exploratory skills.
Puzzles require kids to learn and recall shapes, colors, and patterns. Also, they help kids build better finger strength and enhance their perseverance, problem-solving, and logical thinking skills. All of these educational factors make puzzles great toys for toddlers.
There are a variety of options for puzzles in the market. Still, checking online puzzles is a great option to easily reach a variety of puzzle alternatives suitable for kids' ages and skills. Online puzzles improve kids’ focus, memory, and visual-spatial reasoning skills and provide them a mental exercise.
If you are looking for various puzzle alternatives for your kids, you can easily utilize MentalUP’s brain puzzles and activities. 🎈
The MentalUP app includes more than 150 brain puzzles in word, picture, entertainment, and logic categories. Also, it can be used anytime, anywhere! 🎮
If you are looking for some ideas to make handmade DIY educational toys for toddlers, beanbags might be what you need.
Beanbags are great for supporting kids' balance, spatial awareness, and fine motor skills. You can make your beanbags at home and decorate them with different textures and materials to provide your toddler with a sensory play experience. Plus, you can use it for multiple games and activities!
An educational wooden toy is a must for every kid's toy arsenal. This stacking set is one of the most educational wooden toys for toddlers.
The toy’s baseboard consists of 4 separate turtle shapes, and it allows toddlers to split and combine them with fun accessories in different shapes and colors. Thus, it is great for supporting kids' gross and fine motor skills, imagination, color recognition, and hand-eye coordination.
Dimpl Digits is one of the most simple yet educational sensory toys for younger and older toddlers. The toy is designed in different colors and numbers to improve kids' recognition skills.
Playing with it is simple. Toddlers push the circles all the way in to pop them through to the other side. While playing with this fun learning toy, kids can learn colors and numbers and improve their finger strength.
The toy also encourages a sense of calm, improves their focusing skills, and increases their sensory awareness.
If you need some educational electronic toys for toddlers, this one might be a good alternative to provide your kids with a variety of beneficial content. This learning table depicts a town and includes a variety of stations to teach kids about animals, the alphabet, shapes, numbers, and colors.
It is great for providing toddlers with and supporting their hand-eye coordination, imagination, color recognition, and numeracy skills. It also includes three levels.
The first level sparks kids' curiosity with words and sounds; the second level prompts toddlers with simple questions, and the third level promotes open-ended play.
Toddler learning toys made with natural materials is great for providing kids with a safer play experience. Considering its wooden material, it is true to say that this domino puzzle is one of the most natural educational toys for toddlers.
The toy is great for preschoolers and older toddlers. It teaches kids about animals, fruits, nature, and everyday objects. It helps them practice their fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and problem-solving skills by matching, sorting, and stacking the dominos. Also, it improves toddlers' spatial awareness.
Educational toys not only help children learn curricular subjects, like numbers, letters, and colors, but it also helps kids stimulate their cognitive skills and expand their overall learning abilities. Great educational toys for toddlers support kids' essential skills and mental and physical abilities during early childhood.
Let’s outline the 5 benefits of educational toys to understand the importance of toddler learning toys.
Kids develop their motor skills naturally when they are playing, running around, or picking things up. Educational toys accelerate the improvement of kids' motor skills by helping them practice their small hand muscles, like fingers and thumbs, more often.
Building blocks, stacking toys, and puzzles are especially great for helping kids build their motor skills faster and better. Also, including these hand eye coordination games and toys in toddlers' learning activities is key to encouraging toddlers abilities.
Just like adults, kids also encounter problems and use their problem-solving skills to resolve challenging situations and find a solution. Thus, supporting kids’ problem-solving skills in early childhood is essential to helping kids become more independent and confident.
Educational toys, or learning toys, initiate kids' logic to build and improve better problem-solving skills and help them find more creative ways to solve problems. Puzzle games, construction toys, and stacking sets are great educational toys for toddlers to support their problem-solving skills.
Thus, learning toys that support kids' creative thinking skills have so many benefits during early childhood. These toys improve kids' self-expression skills, gain valuable problem-solving skills, and ignite their curiosity and imagination.
As creative thinking is one of the core skills that is connected with other cognitive skills, enhancing kids' creativity with educational toys that allow open-ended and imaginative play is essential. Learning tables, coloring books, or building blocks are great educational tools for toddlers to spark their creativity.
Advanced communication skills enable kids to communicate and express themselves more confidently and clearly. Still, communication skills are hard to improve in early childhood without any resources.
Educational toys are great resources for improving kids' communication skills in the early childhood years. Finger puppets, sequencing toys, and talking educational toys for toddlers are great resources to support kids' communication skills.
Kids need to improve their social skills in early childhood to learn how to make friends, hold conversations, and experience positive relationships throughout their lives. Educational toys teach kids about teamwork, compromise, confidence, patience, and communication.
Interactive toys that allow children to play in groups or at learning tables are great alternatives to help kids practice their social skills and learn to get along with their peers.
The MentalUP app offers all of these benefits and even more for your kids. In the MentalUP app, you can find a variety of brain games for cognitive development and activities in different categories that enhance kids' overall mental performance. ✨cognitive skills and improve their overall mental performance. ✨
In addition to that, with its rich reporting modules and interactive dashboards, the MentalUP app enables you to track your kid's development and expand their potential! Also, don’t forget that it has no ads or negative content. 🌈
Not all the toys on the market are beneficial for toddlers. Whatever you are looking for, you should always ensure that the toy is appropriate for your kids' age, skills, and interests. Educational toys for toddlers should be able to challenge kids without intimidating them and nurture their physical and mental skills.
Here are some useful tips for choosing recommended educational toys for toddlers:
Until now, we have learned about the best educational toys for toddlers, their benefits, and how to choose them. Now it is time to answer all the questions left in your mind. Let’s get straight to the most common questions about educational toys for toddlers!
The best educational toys for toddlers are the ones that stimulate kids' cognitive development and provide them with a safe learning environment. These toys are well made, high quality, and beneficial to kids’ problem-solving, logical thinking, creativity, and other skills. Puzzles, learning tables, interactive toys, stem toys, and sensory toys can fall into this category.
You can check your local toy shops to buy educational toys for toddlers. Also, you can search online for the top-rated educational toys for toddlers and decide which to buy, considering product reviews and information.
Educational toys help kids reach their developmental milestones faster and more easily, preparing them to have a more successful school and social life. They also enhance their cognitive and physical development. These educational toys are essential for supporting kids in many aspects of their lives.
Puzzles, learning tables, wooden toys that are made with natural materials, musical toys, and toys that promote fine motor skills are best for infants and toddlers. These toys support toddlers' social, communicational, and cognitive skills in their early childhood.
Now, you know everything you need to learn about educational toys that contribute to kids’ skills and learning abilities. If you are struggling to decide and looking for an educational toy that benefits both kids’ daily lives and educational needs, MentalUP is here to help! 😇
The MentalUP app offers a safe learning environment to help you expand your kids' skills and satisfy their educational needs in a fun way. Get started with MentalUP right away to join 10 million users worldwide! 👪