Stacking & Nesting Toys

Nesting Toys and Learning Child

Stacking and nesting toys help a child develop ideas about size, shape, texture, weight, density, and distance. By encouraging exploration and manipulation, they can actually speed him toward mastery of large motor skills, like walking, and social skills, like talking.

Nesting Toys

Nesting toys--toys that fit together--include graduated bowls, measuring cups, or commercially designed boxes, eggs, houses, or other shapes. These emphasize relationship: there is big and bigger, small and smallest, bigger than, smaller than, and so on. Children usually respond to nesting toys between one and two years of age. By fitting one piece inside another, toddlers learn words that describe placement: over, under, in, out.

Stacking Toys

These include blocks, cardboard bricks, cups, plastic storage containers, and some nesting toys. These are suited to children just under a year old to even preschool age. A baby might attempt to put a block on top of a block; a toddler will gleefully make a tower only to knock it down; a preschooler will note size graduations and carefully construct a building or tower with an eye to how high it can go without falling over. All allow a child to see cause and effect firsthand.

Seamless Learning & Playing

Child psychologists and educators have long promoted learning through play. It is a natural way for your child to practice necessary skills and develop a knowledge base while having fun. Your toddler learns by doing while having fun. Playing and learning become seamless.

Favorite Featured Baby Toys & Gifts Brands

Badger Basket

Boppy

Carters

Empire Silver

Hasbro

Learning Curve

Manhattan Toy

Step2

Toysmith

Vulli