Educational Toy Recommendations

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I’ve been meaning to share some images of my little one’s BIG GIRL BED!  If I really was a good mom, I would have posted these months ago when Livi first starting sleeping in it which was before Christmas (if you can imagine).  It’s amazing that I got around to taking pictures at all!  One day the hubby and I awoke to find Livi out of her crib!  Pretty much my worst nightmare.  I had always anticipated a BIG fall, head injury and/or broken bones included.  We are lucky that, apparently, she is pretty durable.  Anyhow, from that day on she did not sleep in the crib.  In fact, because we did not purchase the toddler bed converter with our crib we had no choice but to set up the big girl bed immediately.  So much for transitioning her slowly.  For a few nights, we had her crib mattress on the floor until we purchased a full size mattress and box spring.  She didn’t like sleeping on the floor much.  I couldn’t really blame her.  I think she was accustomed to the enclosure of the crib setting.  To make a long story short, we purchased a full size mattress within less than a week and she was sleeping in her big girl bed in no time at all!  It took some time for her to get used to it, but overall she made the transition smoothly!  Of course now she wakes up much earlier than she used to but, still, she has always been and still is (luckily) a great sleeper!

So the big girl bed started me to think of big girl toys.  Livi has quite a few of them.  The ones that stand out most to me, though, are these four educational ones I thought I’d share with you.  The links and images provided are from Amazon.

1. MindWare Imaginets One word for you: “AWESOME”! Recommended ages: 3 years and up
Great for fine motor and thinking skills The challenge: try to recreate the images on the cards with magnetic shapes  

2. Animal Pattern Blocks by Melissa & Doug
Recommended ages: 2 years – 6
Also good for fine motor skills, shape learning & recognition
The challenge: Match the colorful shape pieces to the puzzle board shapes to create an animal
Bonus: Boards are double sided

  3. Sort & Snap Color Match by Melissa & Doug
Recommended age: 2 years Great for color sorting and recognition skills
The challenge: Use colorful pegs to match colors on the reversible picture cards
Bonus: Yes these, too, are double sided

4. Big Button Number Fun by, you guessed it, Melissa & Doug
Recommended ages: 3 years – 7
Learn numbers and shapes
The challenge: match the number cards and shapes for each board

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