Best Educational Toys for Babies

The toys below are the best educational toys for babies based on those that my boys (who are now 6 and 2) liked as babies.

Babies learn so much through play and these toys can help introduce hand eye co-ordination, help develop vocabulary and speech, hone fine motor skills, introduce new concepts such as numbers and colors and build babies confidence too.

Having a wide range of educational toys helps introduce babies to new ideas, sounds, sights and concepts giving them a head start in life.

Read on for the best educational toys for babies.

This is a great educational toy which will teach your baby, 1,2,3, animals, colors and ABCs through about 100 songs and activities on the table and through music. It's also fantastic for helping improve fine motor skills with the 7 activity points on the table.

It suitable from 6 months to 3 years so is a good investment.

Probably the best activity table available.

Shapesorters are great toys for teaching shapes, colors and honing fine motor skills.

Suitable for babies from about 9 months.

These floor mats are made of foam shapes which babies can sit and and move about on. They will start to learn to pull the shapes apart, which helps them understand how things fit together. The mats obviously expose babies to numbers and letters which parents can talk about with their children and introduce them to babies at an early age.

As babies get older they can learn how to put the shapes together like a jigsaw introducing them to spatial relationships. They are great for toddlers and older children too.

As you've probably guessed I'm a huge fan of stacking toys. I think they have lots of educational value for babies, teaching colors, numbers (count the rings as you put them on the toy) and honing fine motor skills. They also used to keep my son busy playing for ages, a bonus for me.

Here are a few more stacking toys to consider.

My sons love put in and take out play. This included putting things in my bag and taking them out again. So I found it was a good idea to find some toys that facilitated this kind of play.

Check them out below.

Walkers also make great toys for babies. My son had one with blocks with letters on. He used to love taking them blocks out and putting them in again. We used them to build towers, teach colors, letters and numbers too. The walker was obviously good for teaching him to walk.

Fisher Price make a great range of educational toys called the Laugh and Learn range. We had two of the laugh and learn toys (the teaset and the kitchen featured below) and they were a great hit with my youngest son.

Each toy teaches slightly different things. Depending on the toy you buy the are designed to teach babies words, numbers, shapes, colors, opposites, manners, hone fine motor skills and lots more through fun activities, music and song.