Speech Therapy Toys for Toddlers
Play is an important part of your child’s development—one that’s closely related to language development. It’s important to value, encourage and support play by providing a lot of opportunities for it. And one of the best ways to do that is with high-quality toys and activities for your little ones!
Today, we’re rounding up our favourite speech therapy toys for toddlers and teaching you why we love them—so you can hit the easy button and add our picks to your list OR go hunting for new favs that have the same benefits.
What We Look For in Speech Therapy Toys for Toddlers
#1 Open-Ended Toys That Encourage Imagination
Open-ended toys are the best speech therapy-style toys for toddlers. Open-ended means these toys can be used for just about anything—as long as you use just a little imagination! For example, an open-ended toy like building blocks can be used to build a tower, then as ingredients for soup in a pot, then turned into a car!
Open-ended toys allow toddlers to use their imaginations and be active participants in their play. As a result, it opens doors for opportunities to practice communication! On the other hand, when they engage with toys that aren’t as open-ended—toys can DO things like light up, sing, and dance—they become passive participants in play. (Not to say that we never use them—they can be great for kids learning cause and effect—an early play skill—and learning to enter play.)
Next time you shop for your toddler, choose open-ended toys that encourage imagination and creativity in this way. As a general rule, these will be toys without batteries.
Tip: Look for toys that can BE things, rather than DO things
#2 Quality Over Quantity
When it comes to toys for toddlers, less is more, because having too many toys actually decreases play! It makes deciding what to play with a lot harder, and while they play, it makes it so that a lot of other things are vying for their attention.
A study by researchers at the University of Toledo found that toddlers who were given fewer toys played longer, deeper, and more creatively than toddlers who were given more toys. This was because the children who were given more toys were too distracted by all the choices to engage in the same depth of play as the kids with less.
When you make just a few high-quality, thoughtful toys available, you give your toddler less choice, which is helpful for them! Keep your toy collection small, aiming for high-quality toys that will last throughout childhood and that align with their interests when you can.
Tip: Consider rotating your child’s toys, so they have fewer options available at any given time.
Speech Therapy-Approved Toys for Toddler Development
If we’re going to talk about toddler toys, we need to talk about toddler play! Just like we see in other areas of development, there is a developmental progression for toddler play. As speech therapists, we always keep that progression in mind when choosing toddler toys.
As they grow and develop, toddlers start to experiment with play concepts like:
Cause and Effect
Pretend Play
Constructive Play
Active Play
...and more! So as you build your collection of speech therapy-approved toys for your toddler, you’ll want to collect a variety of toys that have some of these concepts built in. In particular, look for toys that will grow with your child or serve multiple functions. Here are some examples:
Cause & Effect Toys
With a cause and effect toy, toddlers discover that they can control outcomes through their actions. They play purposefully with objects in an intended and repetitive manner, then repeat the action because they remember the pattern.
A toddler experimenting with cause and effect might drop a car down a ramp, hit a drum to hear the boom, turn the crank on a pop-up toy, stack and knockdown blocks, hammer toys through holes, or experiment with a shape sorter.
We love these cause and effect toys:
Bubbles
Car Ramps
Small Cars
Toys for Constructive Play
Through constructive play, toddlers learn about materials, get curious and use their imagination, and experiment—looking for new and exciting ways to use the materials they have.
Any play a toddler is engaged in that involves constructing something new with materials they have is considered constructive play. Think: building, crafting, stacking, sorting...all that good stuff!
Our fav toys for constructive play are:
Play-Doh
Potato Head
Magnatiles
Dot Markers
Puzzles
Toys for Pretend Play
Pretend play includes things like playing house, playing store, dressing up, having tea parties, and playing with trucks or cars all fall into this category.
The following information all comes from Learn to Play’s handout on pretend play, written by Karen Stagnitti:
When children engage in pretend play, they are playing ‘as if’ something or someone is real. They create a situation where more is going on than what’s happening in real life. A child might be placing a cup to the doll’s mouth and then lying the doll in a bed ‐ but to the child, the doll is alive and really drinking (and it might even burp) and when the doll is put in the bed, the doll is really sleeping – and so the child will have to wait until the doll wakes up.
Learn to Play also explains how the above makes pretend play a thinking skill that relies on three key thinking abilities:
Using objects and pretending they’re something else (the box is a bed)
Attributing properties to objects (the tea is ‘hot’)
Referring to invisible objects (there’s a dog near the doll, but the dog is invisible)
Typically, children start to engage in pretend play between 11 and 18 months old, but it becomes really noticeable at age four when they can start to maintain the same “game” or “scene” of pretend play for days at a time.
Some of our favourite pretend play toys are:
Dress Up Clothes
Shopping Cart
Play Kitchen
Dollhouse
Play Farm
Doctor Kit
Toys for Active Play
There’s actually a lot of research that suggests movement promotes language. So the toys we’ve included here encourage movement while also promoting joint attention and leaving room for imitation skills. (We really love the wobble board because it’s a gateway to pretend play!)
These are some of our favourite movement toys:
Wobble Board
Small Trampoline
Ride-on Toy
Basketball Hoop
Learn The Toddler Play & Language Milestones
We hope this post has given you tons of ideas for speech therapy toys for the toddlers in your life. Toys go far in supporting play, which goes hand in hand with development. In fact, they often progress together!
If you love learning about your toddler’s speech, language, and play development, download our developmental milestones checklist! It will help you better understand how your toddler’s skills will progress, and tell you exactly what skills to support and watch for next!