Skill Building Through Play

Before his second birthday, your one-year-old will learn, practice, and perhaps even master a remarkable number of skills. He will move from crawling to walking to running. He will go from babbling to chattering. On his first birthday, he could just barely pick things up and grasp them. By his second, he can pick objects up with ease, rotate them, throw them, catch them (well, some of the time), and stack them. Toys play a critical role in these developments. The best toys for your toddler give him an opportunity to practice all these new skills in a variety of different ways.

Balance, Walking, and Climbing

Even before your child can walk, he can use toys and games to strengthen his leg muscles and improve his balance:

• Ride-on toys with wheels (cars, trucks, scooters, various animals) can help your child do both. Your one-year-old also will enjoy the mobility these toys provide: By pushing down with his feet, he can scoot along without having to stay on the ground. This gives your toddler an entirely new perspective on the world inside your home.
• After he's started walking, a pushcart or push-along corn popper can help him practice. Pushcarts are sometimes designed as shopping carts, trucks, baby carriages, vacuum cleaners, or lawn mowers—which make them not only useful to the early walker, but also fun for later toddler games of make-believe.
  Make sure any pushcart you choose has a low center of gravity. It needs to be stable enough for your early toddler to use the handle to pull himself to a standing position. If your child is not yet steady on his feet and the pushcart is lightweight or top heavy, it will flip over on top of him.
• A makeshift balance beam can help your toddler improve his balance and the coordination of his feet. At first, just set a six-foot length of board directly on the floor. As your child's balance improves enough to let him negotiate the length of the board successfully, then you can start to raise it a little by putting several books under each end of the board. By your child's second birthday, you may be able to raise it all the way to chair level.
• As your toddler's standing balance and walking both improve, he will acquire the ability to turn his head while walking. At this point, a pull toy will entertain him, especially if it makes clicking or other noises. Noisy pull toys allow your child another opportunity to observe cause (movement) and effect (noise). Another good pull toy is a train that links up cars using hooks and rings. This encourages experimentation (will a ring connect with a ring?) while improving your toddler's manual dexterity.
• Near the end of your child's second year, he will enjoy "kicking" a large, soft ball. Actually, he won't really kick the ball, because he cannot yet sustain one-legged balance. But he'll use his legs and lower body to bump it along in front of him and he'll have a lot of fun doing it.
• Games and activities can help improve walking skills, too. "Ring-around-a-rosy" will let your toddler practice sitting, standing, squatting, jumping up, walking sideways in a circle, and maintaining his balance throughout. Dancing to any kind of music also will improve balance and walking skills.
• A toddler slide or toddler steps that are safe for your child to climb are also good ideas. Having a safe alternative will help curtail your toddler's urge to climb on more dangerous chairs, benches, sofas, tables, and shelves.
• After your toddler has mastered a variety of walking and climbing skills, set up an obstacle course using cloth tunnels, sofa cushions, cardboard boxes, toddler slides, and so on. Your child will love to crawl, climb, stand, and walk through, around, over, and under all the obstacles you create.

Hand-Eye Coordination

Toys that challenge your toddler's ability to manipulate objects will provide her with practice using her hands and seeing how they work. Your child will be amazed to discover that hands can build (and take apart), stack (and knock down), and put one thing inside of another (and take it out).

• By about 15 months, your toddler will probably be able to build a three-block tower—or line up five or six blocks in a row. Blocks of various kinds are very versatile learning tools (as well as fun toys).
• Toys that fit together also let your toddler practice new manipulative skills. Stacking and nesting cups (which also can be used to build a tower) are classics. Six or eight plastic bowls of the same size work especially well for the early "nester," because they can fit together in any order.
• Your toddler will enjoy filling and dumping containers, too: sand buckets, plastic bottles, shape molds, and those same stacking cups and plastic bowls.
  Your child will love experimenting with the different properties of water, sand, and snow that she discovers through filling and pouring. She can practice these skills in the bathtub or kiddie pool, a sandbox, or even a large pan filled with uncooked rice.
• Wooden (or plastic) jigsaw puzzles will give your toddler lots of practice at complex hand-eye coordination. At first, choose puzzles that have a knob on each piece, which will make it easier for your child to grasp and rotate. Besides helping improve your toddler's manual dexterity, puzzles can increase your child's understanding and appreciation of different shapes.
  But don't wander off when your child's doing a puzzle. She may initially need your help figuring out how to turn and fit the pieces. Or you may want to help by sorting pieces and limiting your child's choices-which may cut down on her frustration level while still allowing her to do the puzzle herself. Even when she insists on doing it herself, your toddler will probably show more patience and persistence if you stay with her and cheer her on.
• As your toddler nears her second birthday, a shape box (a box with cut-outs on the sides for inserting different shaped blocks) is also terrific for improving manual dexterity. Like jigsaw puzzles, however, shape boxes demand mastery of a complex set of skills: Your child not only has to match the shape of a hole and the shape of a piece; he also needs to rotate her wrist to fit the piece through the hole.
• Your child will start sorting objects (though not always according to a classification you will understand) in the second half of her second year. What's alike? What's different? Your toddler may organize all her balls or stuffed animals. Or she may separate all the cows from the pigs in a toy farm set.
• Though your child probably can't catch yet, that doesn't mean you should ignore the play possibilities of balls. Given a large enough ball (about half the size of a beach ball—or a beach ball itself), your toddler can kick it, roll it, and stop it with her hands when you roll it back.
  A large balloon also makes a great lightweight ball that cannot hurt your child. Your toddler can spend lots of time trying to catch it—or at least keep it up in the air by chasing it down and swatting it. If you add a cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels, you'll have a perfectly safe bat and ball set for indoor or outdoor play.

Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Parenting a Preschooler and Toddler, Too © 1997 by Keith M. Boyd, M.D., and Kevin Osborn. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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