Toys for Your Six-Month Old

At six-months old your baby will have reached many milestones, but there are still many more to come. One of the biggest things that your baby has to work towards is understanding cause and effect, but also developing their hand-eye coordination. Your baby will develop their hand-eye coordination through playing with objects that require them to use their hand-eye coordination, which most toys from here on out encourage that development. Your baby will also be playing with toys that help them understand that their actions are what caused something to happen, which develops their understanding of cause and effect.

Here are some toys that you can give your six-month old to play with so they can learn as they play.

Number One: Stacking Toys

At six-months old one of the biggest challenges that your baby will face is hand-eye coordination; in fact they will be working on this skill throughout their first year. With how much work goes into hand-eye coordination, any toys at any age that encourage hand-eye coordination are a bonus, but as they get older the toys get better and work more on this skill. At six-months old, one of the best toys to use for developing hand-eye coordination is stacking toys. These toys require your baby to stack objects on each other so that they are balanced; the goal is to place the objects on top of each other so that nothing tips over. In the beginning your baby is simply going to stack objects in any random way; as they get older, they will be able to stack by size and will learn that bigger items have to go on the bottom. Of course, the best part to stacking toys is that once everything is stacked you get to knock it down and start all over again. Some of the more popular stacking toys are blocks or boxes that rest inside of each other, but there are also the stacking rings: you place the rings around a pole in the center of a rocking base.

Number Two: Imitative Play

Toys that require your baby to imitate your movements are another big hit at this stage. These toys are fun because they will encourage your baby to become more aware of their surroundings. Babies at this age are very interested in everyday objects, they would be perfectly happy playing with your pots and pans. You can buy your baby toys that imitate everyday objects or you can allow them to use your objects that are in your house. These types of toys can also help to further develop your baby’s sense of cause and effect by allowing your baby to do things with everyday objects. They will eventually learn that they were the ones who caused something to happen. For example, letting them turn a water faucet on and off or even turning a light switch on and off.

Number Three: Books

Board books or even soft books are great for this age. The books can be filled with a variety of activities, such as soft or hard textures to allow baby to explore their surroundings. Books can also provide you with a chance to sit on the floor and play with baby. You can read your baby the words in the book or you can talk about the different pages of the book. By helping your baby recognize the different features that the book offers you will be encouraging your baby to explore their world, which helps them develop their sense of touch. These books are a safe way for your baby to pat and point at objects and you can reinforce what they have found through words, which can help them understand naming things.