The Best Stacking Toys to Hone Your Kids’ Cognitive Skills

Buying Guide: Stacking Toys

Stacking toys come in all shapes and sizes, which may make it hard to decide on the right one for your toddler. This buying guide will give you all the essential information you need to know regarding stacking toys to help you pick the most suitable and effective toy set for your child. 

What Are the Benefits of Stacking Toys?

Motor skills

Stacking toys require a kid to frequently move their body to mount one piece on top of another. While your kid can stack toys while sitting, they may also need to stand up to nest the higher parts. This helps your child stabilize their core and improve their fine and gross motor skills. As a result, they become more agile and can walk and crawl faster. 

Eye-hand coordination

Nesting toys within each other requires kids to move their hands according to their sight. This helps them develop better eye-hand coordination so they can process visual input faster and more accurately. Better eye-hand coordination also helps children with performing activities like writing, drawing, typing, and catching a ball.

Spatial reasoning

Spatial reasoning refers to the ability to understand and remember spatial and visual relations between shapes. In other words, it helps to connect math to the physical world. Stacking toys come in different shapes and require kids to reason and remember their shapes and sizes, leading to better spatial reasoning and problem-solving skills.

Imaginative thinking

Stacking toys include a variety of nesting possibilities and combinations. This allows your child to broaden their minds to thinking in new ways. The development of creative thinking teaches children to deal with everyday problems, which helps them perform better at life. 

What Are the Types of Stacking Toys?

Rings

Ring-based nesting toys are essentially rings of varying sizes. Their base contains a stick to hold them steady and allow for frustration-free stackability. Ring-based stacking toys are most suitable for younger kids as they’re easy to stack on top of each other and require minimal reasoning. 

Geometric shapes

Many nesting toys come in geometric shapes like rectangles, squares, triangles, octagons, hexagons, and spheres. These stacking toys are a better fit for kids between 12 months and 18 months of age as they help your child develop shape recognition skills. Geometric nesting toys tend to be versatile and more interesting for kids. Plus, they hone your child’s spatial reasoning skills. 

Cups

Cup nesting toys are generally easy to play with and require minimal space. They’re essentially cups of different sizes that can be stacked on top of one another. Cup-based stacking toys tend to contain alphabets or numbers on their sides to improve your toddler’s number or letter recognition skills. In most instances, the numbers appear when the cups are invertedly stacked.

Objects

Some nesting sets contain unique objects or random shapes that form a specific object when piled up, like a house, a giraffe, or a tree. Such stacking toys are the hardest to play with and spark the most amount of creativity and imagination in your child. Because they’re tough to stack correctly, these toys are ideal for older children who are over 24 months old. These stacking toys are also great at keeping curious kids busy as they try to figure out the right stacking order. 

Things To Consider When Choosing a Stacking Toy

Learning features

Stacking toys include a variety of different learning features other than problem-solving and eye-hand coordination. Some of them have printed numbers or letters so your child can practice saying the alphabet or counting.

Other toys come in multiple colors to help your child with color recognition. Some stacking toys have different shapes to teach your child basic geometry. So, when looking for a stacking toy, make sure it has the learning features you’d like for your child.

Difficulty level

Some stacking toys are fairly easy to stack on top of one another while others require more creativity and problem-solving. Stickless nesting toys, for example, are harder to play with as they lack a balancing stick. Simple stacking toys are perfect for younger kids. But if your little one is between 12 and 18 months old, opt for a versatile and more difficult nesting set for maximum learning.

Safety

You must make sure no piece of your stacking toy set is sharp enough to potentially hurt your child. Always look into the toy’s materials. Most nesting toys are made of plastic and while some of them contain BPA, a commonly used harmful chemical, others do not. If your kid tends to chew on everything they see, make sure you choose a BPA-free stacking toy set to avoid any adverse health issues. 

Size

Stacking toys come in all sizes. Some sets consist of large blocks while others contain tiny ones. As you might expect, the larger nesting toys are suitable for older kids while the smaller blocks fit younger kids better. When deciding on a nesting toy set, make sure your toddler can hold the pieces in their hands comfortably. The height of stacking toy sets also matters. The stacking toy set should be shorter than your kid’s height to ensure a frustration-free play experience. 

Additional Buying Tips

Opt for colorful toys

If you want your kid to remain busy stacking toys for prolonged periods, consider getting them a colorful and attractive toy. This is especially important if your kid loves to watch videos or movies. Some nesting toys feature a colorful theme in the hopes of drawing your child away from the screen. 

Colorful toys are not only attractive but also help your child develop their color recognition skills. We recommend looking for a well-painted stacking toy set. Keep in mind that the paint may chip off if the stacking toy set is repeatedly dropped, so always be sure to choose a high-quality stacking set. One way to do this is by reading through the official customer reviews prior to making a purchase. 

Choose a wooden set

Most stacking toys are made of plastic, which often is made out of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or contains harmful chemicals like BPA. While these chemicals may make plastic toys stronger and more durable, they’re harmful to your child’s endocrine system. Unless you find a BPA-free nesting toy set, we recommend choosing a wooden stacking set instead. This will put your child’s safety first. Natural wood is usually harmless and free of industrial chemicals. 

Smooth stacking

While most stacking toys don’t have this issue, some of them have narrow holes which results in tougher stacking. This can frustrate your child when they’re unable to put a piece onto the stick or take it off due to the small hole. Always choose effective stacking toys that offer smooth nesting to provide a frustration-free experience to your child. Reading customer reviews is a great way to make sure a nesting set is smooth to stack.

Tips for Using Stacking Toys

Keep the toys clean

Toys are prone to catching germs from the floor, carpet, couch, or wherever your toddler plays with them. Certain germs and viruses like influenza survive on toys for hours and may cause illness in your child. To avoid such consequences, make sure you regularly clean your child’s toys. You can either wipe them down with a wet cloth or wash them with diluted bleach to prevent infections. 

Educate your child along the way

You can either leave your child with their stacking toys to keep them busy or you can guide them regarding stacking order, toy sizes, color recognition, and other basic skills during their playtime. A little bit of learning from an early age will help your child pick up skills like counting at school more quickly. 

A substitute for screen time

Kids and multimedia devices are inseparable nowadays. If your child is addicted to a screen, consider limiting their screen time to spark their interest in activities like toy stacking. Stacking toy pieces requires more work and brain power than watching a video or playing a video game. A good way to break your kid’s screen addiction is to turn off the internet on their device after a certain amount of time. 

Use stacking toys in different ways

Putting pieces on one another isn’t the only way to play with stacking toys. You can teach your kid to play with them in many different ways, such as spinning the stacking rings on the floor. Though it’s hard for younger kids to do, most kids that are between one and two years old are able to do this. You can also ask your toddler to spot nearby items that match the color of a nesting toy, which is called color matching. 

Play with your kid

Kids often find it confusing to stack toys in the right order. It can also get frustrating and may cause your child to avoid stacking toys in the future. A good solution is to play with your kid and help them with correct ordering and mounting until they pick up these skills themselves.