Most toys and play activities offer some form of educational benefit, maybe through enhancing a child's emerging motor skills, teaching cause and effect, encouraging spatial awareness or focusing on a more specific skill such as spelling, language or mathes. Many toys are now manufactured with education in mind and many support the key stage developement programmes adopted by schools.
Educational toys, or manufacturers who specialise in Educational toys are listed below, just click on the links to see a more comprehensive list of the educational toys these companies do:
Leapfrog
Leapfrog produce a range of toys suited from birth upwards. Their toys tend to focus on teaching phonetics, the alphabet, colours, and numbers. An increasing number of their toys also now incorporate a bi-lingual option, where numbers and colours etc are spoken both in English and French. They also do a range of popular reading and writing aids.
VTech
VTech specialise in electronic toys suited from birth upwards - teaching phonetics, alphabet, colours, and numbers. They produce a range of childrens laptops programmed with various games to teach maths, language etc. They have also produced the V Smile games consol with a large range of education style games.
Fisher Price
Fisher Price do a vast range of pre school toys from birth upwards. Their laugh and learn range focuses on teaching numbers, letters, colours and more.
Orchard Toys
Orchard toys market a range of games and puzzles aimed at increasing key skills suited to thoses aged around 4+
Set
A fabulous card game in which players must find sets of three cards that have something in common (shape, number of shapes, color, and/or shading) or none of those items in common. If, however, two of the cards have something in common but not the third, then the trio are not a set. The game uses reasoning and logic.
Baby Einstein
Baby Einstein has fabulous array of options for newborns through school ages. Many items for all ages can be found anywhere toys or gifts are sold, or are widely available on-line. This brand is full of color, texture, shapes, and sound. There are also DVDs, VHS, and CDs, for all ages.