Toddlers are little learners who learn by doing things. Playing time gives your child a great opportunity to develop and practice new skills at his/her own pace by following their unique interests. The toys and playthings that your child has can shape his/her development in important ways. There is a huge array of toys that have been developed for the toddler market.

Listed below are guidelines to help you choose toys for your toddler.

Guidelines for Choosing Toys for Toddlers

Choose toys that can be used in a variety of ways: You need to choose toys that are open-ended, which means that your child can play a variety of games with it. Such toys would enable your toddler to solve problems and think logically.

Examples: Interlocking blocks, toys for sand and water play and nesting blocks or cups.

Look for toys that will grow with your child: The usual behavior of a child is to explore a specific toy for a few days and never touch it again. You can change this by engaging him with a toy that can be fun at various developmental stages.

Examples: Toddler-friendly dollhouses, plastic toy animals, stuffed animals and dolls, trains and dump trucks.

Select toys that encourage exploration and problem-solving: Through play a toddler practices new skills over and over again. You should buy your toddler toys that can develop his/her problem solving ability, improve hand-eye coordination, build logical thinking skills, develop spatial relation skills, fine motor skills and enable him/her to figure out something on his own. Explore a few toy stores to find the best.

Examples: Shape-sorters, puzzles, blocks, art materials like paint, clay, play-dough, crayons and nesting cups blocks.

Look for toys that spark your child's imagination: From your toddler’s third year, his creativity starts developing really fast. So look for toys that can boost his/her creative ways of thinking. This kind of pretend play helps in the building up of literacy skills, ability to sequence and develop problem solving skills.

Examples: Toy food and plastic plates, dress-up clothing, action figures, and dolls, trains, stuffed animals and trucks, toy tools, and "real-life" accessories like wrapping paper tube "fire hose" for your little fire fighter. Boxes with pirate ships, houses, barns and tunnels or anything your child can imagine of.

Give your child the chance to play with "real" stuff:” Your toddler would slowly get acquainted with real stuff like torch, brushes, television remote and so on. These act as toys to help in learning spatial relations, develop problem solving skills and develop fine motor skills. No need to visit toy stores for these things. Just check which of the house hold items are harmless for the child to play.

Examples: Plastic dishes containing toy food, toy phone, toy keys, dress-up clothes, child-size brooms, musical instruments, mops, brushes and dustpans.

Toss in some "getting ready to read" toys: At this stage, provide your toddler with art supplies like markers, magnetic alphabet letters, crayons, finger-paints and books, that would help your child to develop early reading and writing skills. You can also provide him with real-life props like catalogs, take-out menus and magazines to help him get acquainted with print, letters and text.

Seek out toys that encourage your child to be active: You should encourage your child to practice his current physical skills and help him to develop the new ones.

Examples: Tricycles or three-wheeled scooters ( equipped with protective gear), balls of various shapes and sizes, child-size basketball hoop, plastic bowling sets, pull-toys, gardening tools to dig and rake with, wagon to fill and pull, moving boxes ( which are open at two ends) to make a crawl through tunnels.

Follow the above guidelines for buying useful toys from the toy stores for the development of your toddler.