4 Best Educational Toys For 2-year-olds To Develop Early Math Skills

by PRC Agency PR

It all began so innocently. You set up a beautiful nursery with an IKEA Kallax shelf and artistically arranged pastel-colored Montessori toys – just the right quantity for healthy development – with a rotation schedule.

Two years later, you’re standing in your living room, knee-deep in a pile of stuffed animals, Lego pieces, little cars, construction blocks, Peppa Pig figurines, and toy food. The clutter has taken your home over. Your toddler is just two years old and they have more stuff than you! And what are they doing right now? That’s right, playing with your kitchen utensils.

When it comes to toys, less is more. When choosing a gift for your child, don’t go with the largest/most expensive/most advertised toy, but instead think of it as a tool that will develop a specific skill. Choose toys that will encourage open-ended, creative play.

Two years old is the best time to start thinking about your child’s math skills. Yes, they will learn to count at school, but by setting the right foundation now, you’ll make it much easier for them to learn, well, anything! Recent studies have shown that early math skills are good predictors of later reading achievement, math achievement through age 15, and even social-emotional behaviors. Even if they don’t become a data scientist or AI engineer, they’ll do much better in whichever field they choose.

Here are 4 types of toys that will help them develop these skills:

Multifunctional construction sets

Wooden blocks, magnetic tiles, Lego, and other construction toys will help your toddler develop fine motor skills, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and spatial reasoning. They'll learn about depth, balance, structural stability, symmetry, and measurement -fundamental mathematical and engineering concepts. Additionally, they will improve hand-eye coordination and grasping techniques, which will prepare them for learning to write later on.

When choosing a construction set, choose one that is versatile, age-appropriate, made of safe, eco-friendly materials, and is just the right size for your toddler’s little hands. Also, it should be something you’ll want to play with yourself!

Tangram

This puzzle game, which you’ve probably played as a child too (it’s been around since the 19th century) is a super simple educational tool that can be used to create countless varieties of shapes. For the youngest learners, it’s a great way to start learning geometrical shapes, colors, similarity, and symmetry, as well as develop spatial visualization skills. Studies have shown that Tangram has a positive impact on students' visual, geometric, and arithmetic abilities.

Cash register

All kids love playing “store”! A toy cash register with coins, paper money, and credit cards introduces toddlers to basic money concepts, such as value and currency. It is also an excellent way to practice sorting, addition, and subtraction, and get familiar with what money looks like (tip – use real coins).

Take turns being the customer and cashier for social skills development, play “grocery store” with plastic vegetables, or make some Play-Doh cookies and open a bakery. A cash register offers limitless opportunities for pretend play!

Hands-on number games

When it comes to number and counting games, there’s a great variety to choose from - shapes and counting puzzles, stacking and sorting sets, magnetic mazes, number trains, and even the good old abacus. Consumer Review Hub suggests the CoolToys Monkey Balance Game – it’s a colorful scale in the shape of a monkey with a set of small counting monkeys and numbers from one to ten.

The key benefit of this game is that it will help your two-year-old to connect symbolic representations of numbers to quantities. To put it simply, if they put the number 3 on one side of the scale, they’ll need to put three monkeys on the other side to balance it.

Early math skills do not come down to numbers and counting. Connecting number names and quantities, patterning, matching, classifying, comparing,