Holiday Gift Guide
The holiday season is here! As pediatric clinicians, we play with A LOT of toys all day with kids a variety of ages. Most of us have built up our list of favorites so we can be prepared for any kid who walks through our doors. In preparation for the holiday season, we asked our clinicians to contribute their favorite toys for infants, toddlers, and school aged kids and the results were incredible! These creative ladies had lots of great suggestions for ways to use these toys to enhance speech/language, feeding, gross motor, and fine motor skills for all ages. Read on for some great tips from our clinicians (and then try not to be freaked out about the amount of items in your Amazon cart!)
Baby K Foot Finder Socks and Wrist Rattles
These rattles are great because they increase awareness of arms and legs, reinforce movement and increase visual attention.
Likee Sensory Toys Shape Sorter
This shape sorter and block set encourages infants to explore a variety of textures with their hands, helps improve their hand strength and works on hand-eye coordination.
PT/OT Toddler Toy Ideas
Little Tikes Easy Score Basketball Set
This fun basketball hoop helps build strength and coordination. You can work on jumping skills, squatting skills, throwing skills and catching skills! You can adjust the height to grow with your child.
Friendly Farm Match n' Stack Nesting Blocks
This farm toy is a kid-favorite here! You can practice turn-taking, hand-eye coordination and vocabulary.
PT/OT School Age Toy Ideas
This is a great game for kids to work on fine motor skills and following directions!
Fotorama Tap It Wireless Ultra High Tech Pod Game
Tap It! can be played alone or with friends. It encourages visual and motor attention as well as motor planning and agility.
Speech Therapy Infant/Baby Toy Ideas
This toy is great for cause and effect. You can target early words such as: up, down, go, and more. Colors are an option too. Many of our clinicians have and love a version of this toy - it is a favorite for sure.
Check out this cute twist on a traditional tummy time mat!
I like this toy because it teaches cause and effect, creates opportunities for requesting, and is engaging for the young child.
This toy is SO fun for 3-6 month olds+. It's great for turn taking, animal labels, animal sounds, and it could be fun for identifying body parts by putting the cloths on your head, feet, etc.
My First Touch and Feel Picture Cards
I have used these with little ones under age one. Love these because they have tactile components and questions on the back which give ideas to parents! Different category sets are available.
Speech Therapy Toddler Toy Ideas
Melissa & Doug Nesting and Sorting Garages and Cars
These are a hit! You can target language skills such as: color identification, numbers, big/small concepts and core words.
Most kids love the movement of these toys. They all do different things like jump, spin, slide, waddle, and so much more. The language and speech possibilities with these are endless. You can target core words like: go, turn on, more. You can target object identification, colors, verbs, and following directions!
This is a game similar to Barnyard Bingo. Great for teaching turn taking in addition to matching. Turn taking is a great way to work on pronouns. When engaging in turn taking games be sure to model turn taking. This means that your turn is your turn and your child's turn is their turn. If we expect the child to take our turn then we are not teaching turn taking.
This is THE BEST toy for babies, toddlers, and even my older school-age kids love it. It helps with every goal possible. I work on requesting, basic vocabulary words, basic body parts, cause and effect, increasing utterance length, following directions, and so many more. I like to tell the kids that the only way the elephant turns on is if he likes the speech he's hearing with his big ears. I could go on and on about how great this activity is forever!
Anything like this from Learning Resources is great. Requesting, commenting, describing, you name it! I use it for both analytical processors and gestalt language processing kids. Great to model phrases.
Melissa & Doug Top & Bake Wooden Pizza Counter Playset
Anything food-related is GREAT for toddlers and preschoolers to work on labeling, requesting, asking wh- questions, and facilitating imaginative play. Kids can work on following directions by adding specific toppings to the pizza. Even better - who doesn't love pizza?!
Big fan of Busy Books for toddlers and preschoolers. Encourages independent learning and problem solving skills. Parents or siblings can engage with the kids with them or the kids can play alone. Great for car trips!
Love this pretend play set for preschoolers and early school age. Pretend play is so important at this age. Pretend play is a critical part of cognitive and language development. Inspires social language when they play with others. As a parent you can follow their lead and help foster their interests.
Loveeeee this book for medial /k/. Lots of target words e.g. “wonky, donkey, stinky, winky, walking,” and many more. It’s a fun book too!
I have made cards with target sounds and the kids have fun pushing them out of the dispenser!
Melissa & Doug Zoo Friends Hand Puppets
Here’s a great toy for joint attention, labeling, feeding all kinds of objects to them, modeling comments like “that’s yummy” following directions “give the banana to the monkey”
Here’s another great toy for people play, peek a boo, and commenting “I see you” or asking “where are you?”
Love these unique cars and have used to work on so many different things. These can be used to target core vocabulary words like “open, close, more, up, go” basic concepts like colors and counting, labeling different types of vehicles, requesting, and making comments about how the cars change. This was an accidental Target Dollar Spot find turned obsession. I will use these all day long!
Speech Therapy School Age Toy Ideas
This game is the best. You can target answer/asking questions, turn-taking, deductive reasoning, articulation (any sound you are working on in speech), comprehension and describing salient features (e.g., Does your person have blue eyes with dark brown curly hair?)
These Guess in 10 games are great for building receptive and expressive language! Also great for formulating yes and no questions, and reasoning skills.
Blue Orange Gobblet Gobbers Board Game
This is a great strategy game for kids who like something challenging and fun during speech. I use in between trials and it works on executive functioning skills.
Magna Tiles encourage creativity and teamwork. The possibilities are virtually endless in terms of what can be created. These tiles are easy to put together, and it encourages shape and color identification. I love that this toy is fun for kids of all ages - I am even tempted to buy a set myself!
I love board games and anything that does not involve technology. This game encourages vocabulary skills, word relationships, and categorization!
Fun to float in water or even bury in sand to retrieve! Can target certain sounds and reinforcement of lower case letters too. This could also be used with phonics activities that can be adapted in many ways.
I also love Lakeshore’s Alphabet Locks. You can work on matching the key to the correct lock, and matching the picture of the word to the initial sound on the back. You can also add sticky notes to increase the amount of sound practice! Very sturdy and it’s fun to go searching for the correct locks. (Think: placing them around chair legs, handles etc!)
Do you have a picky eater? Check out these recommendations from our feeding team to help engage your kids in meal times. The overall idea with all of these items is to get your kids involved in the cooking process and to make food fun! It's particularly helpful for our picky/selective eaters.
Animal Shaped Cookie Cutter Set
Fun Sandwich and Bread Cutter Shapes for Kids
Constructive Eating Construction and Dinosaur Set
Anpro Complete Kids Cooking and Baking Set
Guidecraft Classic Kitchen Helper Stool
Special thanks to all of our clinicians for contributing some great ideas for gifts this holiday season! Hopefully this will also help provide good insight for how to use what you already have at home to engage with your child and help encourage development in these areas through play.
We are looking forward to an exciting holiday season with our patients and their families this year!
