Stack, play and learn

For you may be just another toy that the toddler only has to put the rings into it, but that “simple toy” has a lot of benefits for your little one, stacking toys consist of a cone and several different rings with different sizes and colors. The rings can be stacked around the cone according to the size, with the biggest one being at the bottom. stacking toyshas many different play possibilities and can be used at different levels. Basically there are three different skills you can teach with these stacking toys:

Hand-eye coordination: You can start using baby stacking rings as soon as your baby is able to sit upright (usually around 6-7 months). To start with, ask your baby to take the rings off the cone. At this stage, they may not have the hand-eye coordination to put the rings back on, but as they get older (reaching 1 year of age), you can ask them to put the rings back one by one. Because at this age your child does not know the size concept yet, you can give the ring one by one (according to the size) to put back on.

Cognitive skill, color recognition: your child needs repetion before she can understand what the word means. So you need to talk about color although your child is still young. At 2 years When your child reaches two years of age, she may begin to understand the meaning although she may not yet be able to say it. You can test her understanding by: asking her to choose between colors. Show two rings to her and ask her to choose, for instance, the red one, or the blue one, and so forth. Putting all the rings on the table, and ask your child to give you a ring of certain color. Otherwise, you can ask her to put the ring of certain color back on the cone.

Cognitive skill, size recognition: Your child will be ready to learn about size differences using infant stacking rings when she is over two years old or older. Here are the tips on how you can do it:

Introduce the concept by 'accidently' give the wrong size of the ring to your child to put back on the cone. The ring will either not fit the cone (if the ring is too small) or the stack of rings will look weird (if the ring is too big).

Then guide your child to put the rings back to the cone the right way by introducing the concept of big vs small. To start with, show the biggest and the smallest rings since the size difference is obvious.

Once your child appreciates the big vs small concept, then you can go on comparing the two which has less obvious size differences. Continue to compare each ring to the next larger/smaller size and at the same time ask her to put the rings back on the cone.