Toys that Promote Child Involvement

Whether you are a parent purchasing toys for your own child at home, or a provider purchasing for a child care center, choose toys that will actively involve children. Toys should move children to explore, manipulate, invent, and problem solve. In this way, children learn for themselves. They learn to use their imaginations.

Spectator toys such as battery-powered toys and video games require little action on the child's part. Avoid purchasing these types of toys. Besides being costly, their appeal with children is quite often brief. Children will leave these toys for others that involve more imagination.

Choose simple toys. Too much detail limits imagination. Open-ended materials free children to use their minds and express their creativity. Blocks, play dough, paint, sand, and construction sets are open-ended toys. Using these items, children build structures, make designs, and play games. Children find endless ways to use such toys.

Blocks motivate creative thinking because of the planning that’s involved. They have to do lots of problem solving. They learn concepts of physics without saying it in such a scientific way. A child learns about depth, width, height, length, measurement, volume, area, classification, shape, symmetry, mapping, equality (same as), and inequality (more than, less than)--all from building with blocks.

The dramatic play area is a particularly good place for children to act out their developing awareness of the people around them. Their imaginations allow them to act out what they cannot yet be in real life. During this type of play, children make decisions and choices; they learn problem-solving skills. Language concepts are developed as children engage in play.

Children enjoy playing with a variety of toys that helps develop their fine-motor control. These toys include Lego's,  Bristle Blocks, Play-Dough, puzzles, beads, sewing cards and writing materials.

In a sensory table, a child has a practical math lesson in fractions when she pours a cup full of sand into a two-cup container. It explains the concept faster and more clearly than a detailed discussion or drawing. Their fine-motor skills are also being developed as they wash a tea set or maneuver a cup full of sand into a sifter. Their eye-hand coordination is also helped. There is no right or wrong way to play with sand and water (except to throw it out of the basin), so each child experiences success.

To nurture reading and writing skills, the book corner should have books reflecting a range of levels. There should be simple board books, as well as picture books with a story line, fiction and non-fiction. Through these stories, children learn many of the conventions of written language, use picture clues, and play with the sounds of language.


Don't let the toys do the work. Encourage imagination. Let their minds grow. They will be better for it.