Learning Through Manipulative Toys

Table toys offer children a rich means for working on physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive skills. For example, by completing a puzzle, children can practice eye-hand coordination, learn to match objects, and experience the satisfaction of successfully completing a task. Table toys provide a context in which learning is both satisfying and ongoing.

By exposing children to increasingly more complex table toys, teachers can help children progress. At the start of the year, a child may work on a simple puzzle, learning matching skills. Later, this same child can apply the learned matching skills to a game of lotto and eventually to sorting buttons according to more than one attribute (e.g. red with two holes). The matching skills of the child expand developmentally through the use of increasingly more complex table toys.

Stages of Table Toys:

• Exploration


• Experimentation