A classic toddler favorite for your baby is shape sorters. What makes a shape sorter such a great toy and favorite of babies is that they are a challenge. The baby has to manipulate the pieces with their fingers and fit them through the right holes in the top of the sorter. When they play with a shape sorter, they can learn to categorize the different types of shapes and over time they will even begin to name the shapes.
When is the right time to add a shape sorter to your baby’s playtime activities? My daughter got her first one for her first birthday. By the time they are 15 to 17 months of age, they have begun to develop the hand-eye coordination they need to fit the pieces through the correctly shaped holes. It’s important when they are playing that you lay down on the floor at times so that when they begin to get frustrated you can pitch in a helping hand.
Some Frustration is a Good Thing
It can be hard to balance the need to help our baby versus letting them help themselves. A certain amount of frustration is a positive thing for your baby, though. Frustration spurs change and it spurs learning. Don’t let them get so angry they throw the toy across the room (yes, my daughter began to develop a great pitching arm with her shapes, but she thought it was funny to throw them like a baseball – and after my husband did a rim shot with one – it took a while to convince her that it wasn’t what they were designed for!)
Still, shape sorting also teaches rudimentary problem solving. So if you are looking to get your toddler started, you can easily get started by taking some food container lids of varying sizes and shapes. If they are already on solid foods, you can offer them cheerios and crackers – the round cheerios, the square crackers, the rectangular Waverly’s and more – the toddler can sit in their high chair and play with the shapes – making pictures, crumbles, munchies and fun.
Be sure to be consistent as you name the different shapes. When babies are learning, they key into repetition so if you are going to call your cheerios rounds, be sure to always call them rounds and your crackers should be squares and so forth and so on. By the time she was two, my daughter would request round crackers when she wanted her Ritz Crackers and squares when she wanted Saltines.
From Food to Plastic
When your toddler is showing some mastery at sorting their food or lids, you can upgrade to the sorting toy. It sounds odd to say upgrading, but that’s what you are doing. Baby gets to learn about cause and effect when they push pieces through the holes and they disappear. It also teaches them about object permanence – the idea that just because the object went away doesn’t mean it vanished out of existence. Your baby may be more interested in dumping the sortable pieces out and making a mess at first – that’s okay.
We used to laugh that our daughter’s favorite activity between 18 and 22 months was being put into her straightened up play area so that she could totally destroy it. She would giggle like a mad woman when you climbed in and began putting things back together for her. She would clap her hands and even wait patiently until you were done and then we would step out – arms would gesture and boom – the race was on to see how many sorted items she could get unsorted.
Eventually, she began sorting them herself and by the time she was 2 – she adored putting all of her items into a specific order. She would even rearrange toys in bookstores, toy stores and Target if they weren’t in the right places. I can’t tell you how many clerks she charmed with her obsessive need to put all the stuffed cats together on one shelf – in sorted order of color and then size.
What sorting toys and activities does your baby enjoy?
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