Educational Toys for 4-5 Year Olds

The world of toys is endless. There are a lot of toys with colors, materials, and different benefits on the market. In addition, toys vary according to intended purpose and age. All of these factors make choosing the appropriate educational toys hard for parents.

Luckily, as MentalUP, we are here to help parents solve this confusion. In this blog, we will explain what makes a toy educational and list the best educational toys for 4-5 year olds that benefit their personal development.

If you want to discover the world of toys, we suggest you keep reading! Here we go!

What Makes a Toy Educational?

Before getting to the best educational toys for 4-5 year olds, let’s clear up what makes a toy educational for kids. The answer to this question depends on the expected benefits of the toys.

Toys that are designed for kids to stimulate learning while playing can be called educational toys, or by its other name, a learning toy.

These kinds of toys are generally designed for kids intending to meet an educational purpose like improving numbering, categorizing, and creativity skills. In addition, they typically aim to teach kids about subjects like animals, food, and seasons during the games to play at home.

13 Best Educational Toys for 4-Year-Olds

Age is the most determining factor for kids' educational needs and personal development. Four-year-olds are still trying to figure out the things around them. And they tend to question everything they come across.

So educational toys for 4-year-old kids should contribute to their curiosity and teach them about the world around them while enhancing their physical and cognitive skills.

In addition, the best educational toys for 4 year olds typically include experimental toys that enhance kids' communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving skills.

Checking all the toys to ensure that they strengthen these skills can be a daunting task for parents. Thus, we’ve created a detailed list of the best educational toys for 4 year olds. If you want to get straight to the point with choosing your toys, dive into our list!

1. MentalUP

Kids nowadays consider computers and tablets as toys. This situation makes some parents worry about the time that kids spend with technological devices. Yet, we have good news! With the right sources, you don’t have to worry about their screen time.

The MentalUP app provides a safe educational environment for your kids with its fun learning games for 4-year-olds.

By including a variety of activities that improve kids' attention, visual recognition, creativity, problem-solving skills, and learning ability, MentalUP turns every technological device into a high-quality educational tool. So, it is among the best apps for 4 year olds.

2. Toyk - Aqua Magic Mat

This large-sized doodle mat toy joins our list of great interactive and educational toys for 4 year olds with its pens, drawing temples, booklets, and puzzles.

As one of the top educational toys for 4 year olds, this toy and other hand eye coordination games improve kids' physical abilities, and also color perception, creativity, and literacy skills. If you are looking for a learning toy that your kids enjoy playing with for hours, this toy might be the one for you.

3. The Learning Journey- Match It!

The Learning Journey’s Match It toy is a colorful 20-piece spelling puzzle of 3 and 4-letter words. This alternative which is also among the best toys for autistic kids, offers a great chance to enhance kids' vocabulary and spelling skills.

In addition, this award-winning toy boosts children’s letter recognition and reading skills as well as concentration, problem-solving, and fine motor skills. If you need a simple yet educational toy, check this one out!

4. Skillmatics - I Can Write Mat

As the winner of the 2022 Parents’ Picks Award, this writing mat is one of the best educational toys for 4 year olds. This educational toy comes with 14 highly engaging and repeatable activities that build kids' core skills with fun activities.

The activities in this reusable mat include topics from the alphabet, numbers, colors, and shapes to improving kids' problem-solving, creative thinking, writing, and reading skills with age-appropriate, innovative, and skill-oriented content.

5. LIKEE - Wooden Pattern Block Set

This set of wooden pattern blocks is one the fun educational toys for 4 year olds. The set comes with 36 wooden blocks and 60 pattern cards to bloom your kids' imagination and creativity skills.

This toy is a perfect fit for improving kids' color and shape recognition, spatial awareness, and problem solving skills. Your kids will enjoy sorting the blocks by color and shapes and making patterns with them!

6. Cenove - Floral Arrangement Playset

This 130-piece gardening set comes with various accessories and STEM toys that encourage kids to sort, match, and build as they create different kinds of flowers.

As one of the best educational toys for 4 year olds, this toy contributes to kids' naturalistic intelligence and improves their hand eye coordination and gross motor skills, as well as problem-solving, analytical thinking, and ability to spend time independently. It can be listed as one of the best learning games for girls!

7. Maxee- Sight Word Game

This sight word game set is one of the best educational toys for 4 year olds to improve their literacy skills. This set includes 192 sight words coded in different colors according to the level of difficulty.

Your kids can start learning sight words with blue cards that include easy, pre-kindergarten sight words and gradually work their way up to purple ones.

8. Fansteck - Button Art Toy

This is an innovative, educational toy that includes 50 button pegs, two clips, one pegboard, and one storage tray to enhance your kids' cognitive development by making various unique patterns.

As one of the best fun educational toys for 4 year olds, the toy can bring out the artist inside your kids and enhance their hand eye coordination as well as imagination and creativity.

9. Free To Fly - Take Apart Dinosaur Toys

This toy is more than just a sturdy dinosaur set. It comes with a variety of dinosaurs with replaceable body parts to foster kids' imagination and creativity.

In addition, these exciting dinosaurs help kids build better gross motor skills, improve their critical thinking skills and contribute to their brain development.

10. LOKUO - Wooden Dentist Playset

This educational toy set includes a variety of dental tools that kids can pretend play with. This toy is a great source for teaching kids about the concept of dental hygiene and helping them overcome the fear of dentist visits.

Role-playing with this dentist set can help kids improve their social, emotional, and communication skills. Also, it helps them learn medical concepts more easily.

11. Parhlen - Building Blocks

This building blocks set is one of the top educational toys for 4 year olds to improve teamwork skills.

The toy set includes 244 pieces of building blocks, nuts, bolts, wheels, and an interchangeable electric screwdriver. This is a great alternative for parents to support their kids' logical thinking, shape recognition, and creative thinking skills.

12. Wedraw - Interactive Talking Robot

This fun and interactive talking robot comes with STEM essentials to teach kids about shapes, simple math subjects, letters, animals, body parts, jobs, and over 100 sight words.

The robot uses a human voice to teach kids through drawing and enhances hand eye coordination as well as fine motor, problem-solving, writing, drawing, and imagination skills.

13. Homecent - Engineering Building

This is one of the most effective educational toys that encourage kids in science, engineering, art, and math subjects by challenging them to build whatever they can imagine.

Homecent’s building set can help you promote your kids’ hand eye coordination and support their divergent thinking, problem-solving, and creative thinking skills.

10 Best Educational Toys for 5-Year-Olds

Kids’ emotional, social, and thinking skills continue to develop at the age of 5. Kids from this age group start to express their feelings better, recognize concepts of time (like yesterday, today and tomorrow), and build better relationships with their peers.

Thus, educational toys for 5 year olds should teach them about emotional concepts, improve their communication skills, and encourage them to take part in group games and activities.

Typically, the best educational toys for 5 year olds include fun and interactive toys that improve kids' cognitive development and learning ability.

Considering all these factors, we’ve made a list for parents by compiling the best educational toys for 5 year olds. Let’s discover the most age-appropriate and beneficial toys for your 5 year old kid.

1. MentalUP

MentalUP offers the best solution for transforming any electronic device into one of the best educational toys for kids. With its fun learning games for 5-year-olds, the award-winning app can provide an entertaining learning experience.

MentalUP includes a variety of games and activities for 5-year-olds that supports the development of their visual attention, counting, comparison, decision-making, sustained attention, and focusing skills.

2. Educational Insights - GeoSafari Talking Microscope

This educational toy is designed for 5-year-olds and older to teach kids about natural habitats. Educational Insight’s talking microscope comes with 100 facts and questions to feed kids' curiosity and improve their science knowledge.

So this toy can foster your kids' interest in science, biology, botany, and the animal world by improving their naturalistic skills.

3. Connetix - Magnet Blocks

This magnet block set is one of the best toys for 5 year olds as it is specially designed to support the cognitive and motor development of kids while allowing them to play as they want.

Building different objects and environments can encourage your kids to learn STEM concepts like construction, gravity, momentum, and leverage. In addition to that, it improves their creativity, imagination, and social skills.

4. Crayola - Color Chemistry Set

This fun chemistry set will take your kids on a science journey! Crayola’s Color Chemistry set comes with a variety of toys and accessories for your kids to experiment with and build science projects.

Experimenting by matching the colors and creating volcanoes with this set can motivate your kids to learn about colors, science, and chemistry and support their STEM knowledge, like cause and effect, recognition and gravity.

5. Hape - Solar System Puzzle

Hape’s gorgeous solar system puzzle provides a great resource for 5 year olds to learn about solar systems and planets.

We all know that puzzles have many benefits for kids' brain development. So playing with this toy can improve your kids' attention, memory, shape recognition, and problem solving skills as well as hand eye coordination.

6. The Learning Journey - Super Telly Teaching Time Clock

Teaching your kids about time with The Learning Journey’s fun, interactive and educational toy can be a great idea.

This toy is designed to teach kids about both digital and analog times with two teaching methods. Plus, it can be used as a real clock, an alarm clock, and a night light!

7. LeapFrog - Magic Adventures Globe

This interactive learning globe will take little explorers on an adventure with high-quality videos and help them explore the world around them.

Spending time with a learning globe toy can enable your kids to learn about different cultures, countries, currencies, flags, and famous places. In addition to that, this toy can improve your kids' categorization, recognition, and geometry skills.

8. Dan&Darci - Rock Painting Kit for Kids

Dan&Darci’s Rock Painting Kit is one of the top learning toys for 5-year-olds as it contributes highly to kids' creativity, imagination, and STEM skills.

This kit comes with various accessories and colors to provide your kids with experimental art activities. So this kit can teach your kids about arts and crafts and improve their color recognition skills.

9. Butterfly EduFields - Electric Motor Kit

This is one of the most fun educational toys for 5 year olds. The Electronic Motor Kit will encourage your kids to make DIY projects and bring out the little scientist in them.

This set includes 50 pieces and accessories with which kids can build hovercrafts, tornado mixers, motorboats, and many more. If you want to help your kids improve their problem solving and critical thinking skills, you can add this one to their toy arsenal.

10. Learning Resources - Botley the Coding Robot

This fun and interactive robot can teach your kids how to code and improve their STEM skills.

In addition to that, it can help kids explore math, science, technology, and engineering concepts more easily and build better critical thinking skills.

How Educational Toys Are Useful To 4-5-Year-Olds?

Kids from this age group are always curious about the world around them. So they question everything and are highly open to learning new things.

In this situation, educational toys play an important role in teaching them various subjects like STEM, animals, planets, food, and colors.

To be more precise, let’s discover how an educational toy benefits kids’ personal development in four ways.

Increase Motor Development

Motor development in early childhood is essential for kids' long-term personal development. Educational toys provide the opportunity for kids to practice their gross motor skills and improve kids’ hand eye coordination skills.

Improve IQ, Concentration, and Problem-Solving Skills

Educational tools enhance kids' cognitive skills like attention, concentration, problem-solving, and critical thinking. So spending time with educational toys gradually improves kids' overall IQ. You can check your 4-5 year olds’ IQ with the MentalUP IQ Test!

Support Social and Emotional Intelligence

Playing with educational tools can teach kids about emotional concepts and how to express their feelings. So this process helps build stronger social and emotional intelligence skills in children.

In addition to that, educational toys that require playing with other adults or peers can help kids improve social skills by teaching them leadership, sharing, and waiting for their turn.

Boost Creativity and Imagination

During childhood, kids keep an incredible sense of curiosity and they continuously try to understand and figure out the world around them. Thus, educational toys that let kids experiment, create, and build, expand their imagination skills and boost their creativity.

Frequently Asked Questions About Educational Toys

So far, we have learned about what makes a toy educational and discovered the best educational toys for 4 to 5 year olds.

Now, it's time to answer questions about educational toys that might arise in your mind as a parent. Here are the most essential questions about educational toys with answers.