Whether you're a parent, grandparent, friend, or therapist, this gift guide is designed to inspire and engage children in activities that promote speech, language, motor, sensory, and social skills. This gift guide is mainly geared towards preschool and elementary-aged children, although many of these toys and activities are enjoyable for all ages. 

At Garden State Speech Therapy, we understand the importance of fostering new skills in a fun and interactive way. Here's our curated selection of toys and gifts that not only entertain but also encourage the development of crucial skills. For more ideas on how to use these toys or others to encourage skill development with your child, contact us today! 

Lovevery Hide & Find Drop Box Baby Toy

The Lovevery Hide & Find Drop Box Baby Toy works on multiple skills important for babies! As your baby drops a toy in the top of the box and opens it to find it still there, they gain many important skills including object permanence (an important cognitive skill), understanding of cause-effect, hand-eye coordination, fine motor precision, and problem-solving skills.

Soft Rattles

Rattles - we recommend soft rattles to avoid your baby accidentally bonking their head - range from fun bug shapes to the more traditional maraca shape and now even come with a teether too!

Rattles are a simple toy that addresses many early motor, cognitive, and language skills. Rattles introduce cause-effect, sound localization, and help your baby develop joint attention as they turn to you with curiosity while you shake the rattle! When babies shake and interact with a rattle themselves, they are working on exploratory play, an important early cognitive skill.

As your baby shakes and moves the rattle, they learn to recognize patterns and shapes. This improves their visual and auditory perception skills, along with their ability to identify different objects. As babies shake and manipulate the rattle, they learn how to coordinate their hand and eye movements, while improving their fine motor skills as they learn to grip and hold the rattle.

Even filling a box with rattles and allowing your baby to pick which one they want works on an important early language skill - making choices! 

Balls

Infant-friendly balls include Textured Multi-Sensory Balls, the O-Ball, and the Bumpy ball - these are the easiest for babies to grasp and hold at their age. Use these engaging toys to work on eye tracking while you slowly move the ball side to side in front of them. During tummy time, ball play is a great way to encourage weight shifting and visual tracking while you encourage your child to reach for the ball - your baby will use these skills when they learn to roll over! 

By hiding the ball partially under a blanket, your baby can improve their object permanence (an important cognitive concept) by playing “hide and seek” with the ball, and chasing after a ball is a highly motivating activity to encourage your baby to crawl. Once your baby can sit on the floor with some support, a ball can also be used to work on turn-taking. Turn-taking is not only an important early social skill but also works on balance to help your baby become even more independent with sitting. 

Tummy Time Mirror

Mirror play during tummy time is an excellent way to work on a variety of skills while talking, laughing, and enjoying time with your baby. A high-contrast tummy time mirror helps babies develop sensorimotor skills including visual tracking, increased strength and head/neck control, shoulder stability, and learning to push up on their forearms and hands - a skill that leads to crawling.

Mirrors motivate babies to reach, pat, point, and grasp, which are all important fine motor skills. Additionally, using mirrors supports early language development as your baby can start to interact with their reflection by babbling and vocalizing. 

Toddlers

Musical Instruments 

Music is fun and engaging for toddlers and young children! Instruments such as a piano, xylophone, and drums are excellent for building cause and effect skills - essential for language development and social communication! Instruments can also be used to help engage a child to build their attention span, request, comment, or learn to imitate an adult. Listening to different songs and noises that various instruments make are helpful in building auditory awareness and localization. Household items such as a tissue box with rubber bands, wooden spoons, pots/pans, and empty cans can also be used as instruments! 

Shape Sorter

A shape sorter is a seemingly simple toy that targets a huge variety of speech, language, social as well as motor skills. There are so many variations of this toy, ranging from simple shape sorters to more complex shape sorters. The Battat Shapes & Sounds Box can be particularly motivating for a child since it includes a cause-effect component with music as well!

The shape sorter allows your child to strengthen their hand-eye coordination, fine motor and problem-solving skills, develop vocabulary knowledge, identify colors, and follow simple directions. You can even work on developing your child’s cooperative play skills along with expressive language by prompting them to request the shape they want.

Basic concepts, a skill that is difficult for many toddlers, can be targeted by asking your child to give “more,” “all,” “some,” or “none” of the shapes or telling them to find a shape that is “NOT” round or find a shape that is “NOT” green. A shape sorter can even be used to work on spatial concepts including “put in, take out, on top, under.” The possibilities are endless! 

Poke-a-Dot Books

Melissa and Doug’s Poke-a-Dot books are sturdy board books with an interactive component that makes book reading engaging and fun for your toddler! While reading the book with you, your child can press the interactive buttons to make them “pop” on every page. These books encourage thematic vocabulary development, fine motor skills, early literacy skills, and color recognition. The interactive component can help a child grow their attention span by keeping little hands busy while you read! 

Cutting Fruit

There are many options for cutting fruit playsets - toddlers and young children love this toy and it’s a highly motivating way to work on language skills including vocabulary, putting 2-3 words together, requesting, labeling, commenting, and following directions as well as fine motor/visual motor skills including grasping, bilateral coordination, visual manipulation, and visual motor skills as your child chops each fruit and fits the fruit pieces back together.

You can even work on gross motor skills by having your child pick up the fruit pieces during an obstacle course activity! This is also a great way for a child to work on speech sounds including “K, M, B, P, T, N, M”.

Preschool: 3-4 Year Olds 

Play Sets

Whether your child loves farm animals, princesses, or construction, nurture their individual personality and interests while working on language and play skills! When a toy is highly engaging for a child, their motivation to communicate skyrockets.

Play sets offer endless opportunities for speech and language development. For example, you could work on early sounds by practicing “baa” “neigh” and “moo” with a farm set. Your child can increase their ability to follow directions and understand spatial concepts by putting the princess on top of the castle. By incorporating your child’s friends into these activities, you can provide your child opportunities to improve their cooperative play skills as well as pretend play skills. 

Feed the Woozle 

Peaceable Kingdom’s Feed The Woozle is a cooperative game for 2-5 players ages 3+. Peaceable Kingdom manufactures a variety of games that focus on cooperative play rather than competition.

This makes the game perfect for a child working on gross/fine motor skills, early academic skills (counting, matching), vocabulary, following directions, and adjectives while incorporating cooperative play skills with their friends or siblings! This game is also perfect for a child working on /f/, /s/, or /z/ sounds! Other excellent options for Peaceable Kingdom games include Hoot Hoot Owl and Friends and Neighbors. 

Magnetic Tiles

Play with magnetic tiles is an instant hit with young children, and offers opportunities to work on speech and language skills including basic concepts, describing, adjectives, commenting, identifying colors and shapes, requesting, giving directives, cooperative play, following multi-step directions, problem-solving and a variety of speech sounds. Additionally, magnetic tiles can be used to target sensory integration, attention, motor planning, spatial awareness, and fine motor skills. 

Sticker Pads

Reusable sticker pads can be used to target almost any speech or language goal! The wide variety of reusable sticker pads offered - including Habitats, My Town, Pets, and Dress-Up can help your child grow their thematic vocabulary, requesting, commenting, WH-questions, describing, narrative development, labeling verbs, and speech sound production. Sticker play can also help your child improve their fine motor skills including using a neat pincer grasp, bilateral hand coordination, visual scanning, and spatial awareness. 

Kindergarten: 5-6 Year-Olds

Spelligator 

Spelligator is a word-building game excellent for building phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness skills are crucial in kindergarten and early childhood education because they lay the foundation for successful reading and literacy development.

Zingo 

Playing Zingo with your child is a fun and motivating way to target vocabulary development, object function, WH-questions, prepositions, yes/no questions, pronouns, describing, and a wide variety of speech sounds.

Zingo is also a perfect tool to work on social skills including turn-taking and using common social phrases (“good try, that’s cool, aw man,” etc). Zingo can even be used to develop literacy skills - for example, having your child read the word they chose or thinking of a word that rhymes with your picture before taking the next turn. 

Obstacle Course

Perfect for a child on the go! An obstacle course naturally targets sensory integration skills, along with executive functioning, motor planning, kinesthetic learning, core strength, shoulder and wrist stability, head control, balance, and hand strength as well as proprioception and bilateral coordination. Obstacle courses can also help with language skills including following directions, increasing attention, sequencing, and cooperative play skills in a group.