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The Joy of Stacking Toys in Early Childhood

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Lubica Misevski

Stacking is one of the first logical challenges your toddler will ever set for themselves. Around a year old, babies start to stack. They'll stack blocks, rings, and stuffed animals. Small children like to stack anything that has a similar size and shape - and sometimes things that don't. This is a wonderful sign of early cognitive development and creates a path to important development milestones in fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and early mathematics.

What Toddlers Learn from Stacking

Stacking toys give your toddler even more to explore. The littlest stackers delight in a variety of textures, weights, and nesting stack. As your toddler grows, they will develop an interest in stacking games with fun rules and group play. Watch for milestones as your baby stacks their first blocks and little towers.

Which are the best stacking toys to encourage cognitive and fine motor development? Which will be the most fun to play with and grow up with your toddler as they stack two, then three, then six blocks together? Let's explore our favourite stacking toys for any modern nursery:

Tobbles Neo Stackers by Fat Brain Toy Co

The best place to start is sensory stacking. Babies may start to stack around 12 to 18 months when their experiences are highly sensory. Toys with different textures, weights, and colours are fascinating as babies explore their senses and the difference between objects. That's what makes the Tobbles Neo stack so much fun for our littlest stacking baby or toddlers.

Each Tobble is shaped like half an egg with a soft scalloped top to make stacking easy with the added fun of nesting the different-sized pieces together. All six pieces can spin, bounce, and stack in wobbly fun towers on top of a scalloped base.

Multi-Stacking Music Set by Hape

Looking for stacking blocks and a musical toy in the same set? Hape offers a beautiful six-piece set of stacking blocks, each with its own fun musical sound. Made from natural wood, the blocks range from big to small for fun tapered stacking. For extra joy (and musical noise when they fall down) every block is its own musical instrument. The largest block is a drum, the next a three-note xylophone. The middle block is a bell your baby can ring, then a wooden washboard block and the smallest is a little blue music block to go on top.

Your toddler can explore early music and sound development and the joy of stacking in one beautiful wooden set.

Djeco's TopAniFarm Stacking Blocks

Every toddler loves animal toys. Keeping a farmyard of animal toys often becomes practice for their very first pet. Djeco's TopAniFarm is a genius set of stacking blocks that double as little homes for animal pets. Each of these six blocks is a house for a different animal, making an adorable barnyard of friends or a stack of peek-a-boo pets looking out of their little homes.

The bottom layer is a house for a bull with a hay bale painted on the outside. The next is a doghouse for a puppy with a cute spotted eye, then a little pig-house for the pig. On top is a cute tree-house for a kitty, a bunny box for the blue rabbit and finally a little birdhouse for the hen.

Djeco Zirafa Dexterity and Memory Game

As your toddler becomes skilled at stacking, it's time to play some games! Djeco introduces a fun stacking and memory game called Zirafa. The goal is to be the giraffe with the looooongest neck. Flip cards and play the memory game to earn neck pieces. As neck pieces are earned, players are challenged to stack them onto their toy giraffe - without toppling them over. The player with the tallest un-toppled giraffe wins!

Babies and toddlers stack to learn, play, and reach their developmental milestones. Give your toddler the Stacking toys that will help them develop both cognitive and motor skills through the fun of making just about anything into a tower of toys.

You can buy stacking toys from our curated range here.

Posted in Stacking Toys

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