Keep Your Children Engaged With These Fun, Interactive Toys
Children learn through play and interaction with the world around them. I am thankful there are toys out there that make them stop and think instead of just filling their heads with senseless fluff. Children are like sponges at this age, and I feel it is important to give them options that help encourage their developing minds.
Fun Friends Choo Choo
This train is perfect for any toddler that likes to groove to music. It has lights that flash to the beat of the music, and vibrant colors and characters. This train rolls on its own once you push the character in the engine set. Plus if your child switches the character the sounds are different. This groovy train is available on Amazon. This cool train occupied my friend’s children who are ages 8 months, and 2 years. They both really were fascinated with the noises and music. Even my son, who is 13,enjoyed this neat train, while he helped the little ones play with it.
GeoSafari Solar Rover
This solar powered vehicle is great for hours of outdoor fun, and all without batteries. This is a neat tool to create an interest in the science behind solar energy for your children. The solar panels on the car make the back wheels turn. Each panel runs one wheel, and when you cover a panel with your hand that wheel will stop causing the rover to turn. I liked watching my kids try to get the Solar Rover to turn the way they wanted it to. It took some brain power to achieve the directions they needed and get it to move around the cones.
STEM Engineering & Design: Building Set Playground from Learning Resources
This building set, available on Amazon, allows your young engineer to come up with their own designs or follow challenge cards to create a playground. Anyone from age 5 and up can build slides, swing sets, and even a merry go round. All of my family including myself had fun building the playground. I made a simple slide, while my daughter made many different parts of the playground. Then we were able to let the two included toy people try out the playground. It was cute, creative, and fun. My husband added a see saw to the top of the swing set, not very practical, but creative none the less. Next my son came and improved on the designs and now we have a tire swing that slides along a zipline.
The colors are bright and fun, and the pieces are easy to work with. The challenge cards are great because they show you what you need, and give directions on how to make it. In addition to that they then ask the builder to think about an issue they could solve. Such as the slide might get hot, how would you add a roof? I love that it makes them think through a problem.
Young Survivor Set and Optical Illusions Set from The Crazy Scientist Lab
With these sets your children will spend hours playing, experimenting, and learning valuable STEM concepts. Most kits have more than a dozen experiments and the materials needed for each one. The Young Survivor set teaches many vital survival skills like how to starts a fire without matches, how to distill and purify water, make a sundial, a compass, and even how to distill water from plants. This kit is really cool for those kids who want to camp and rough it. It can give them skills they will actually use.
The Optical Illusions set has many neat experiments in it that challenge how we see reality. You can make a bank where the money disappears, look at double meaning illusions, explore color illusions with special spinners, and many more. With this you will see that seeing is not always believing.
Both of these kits came in nice tin cases making storage easy. I was happy all the supplies needed were included, so I didn’t have to search the house or run to the store. My kids have fun with the bank and the spinners. They also thought the illusions shown in the book were really neat.
General Purpose e-cloth
Last, but not least is the e-cloth. Obviously it is not an interactive toy, but instead a great means to keep those toys clean. This cloth protects your children from harmful household chemical exposure which accounts for 30% of childhood asthma. You do not need the chemicals on this e-cloth to remove thick dirt, grease, grime, oil, and over 99% of bacteria from all hard surfaces using only water. It is machine washable and guaranteed to last through 300 washes, and so very versatile.
I put it to the test and the cloth with just water cleaned my glass doors to a clear finish. It removed long ago dried paint from the craft table that has stayed there through many chemicals. It really cleaned very well, and then washed easily in the washer, and was back ready to go again. With this e-cloth you can wipe down all your favorite interactive toys and keep them 99% free of bacteria that could make the children sick.
Which Interactive toy was your favorite?