Toys for introducing STEM to babies and toddlers

For parents of children of any age, STEM is something you need to be familiar with. Science. Technology. Engineering. Math. Without going into too much detail, these are the pillars of our modern world, and it behooves the parent of any child to consider an interest in STEM and encourage the acquisition of STEM-related skills as early in their development as possible.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that we should all race to enroll our infants and toddlers in advanced math classes or shoot them off into space just yet. There are plenty of ways to prepare children for our STEM-dominated world without exposing them to overly-rigorous or unnecessarily advanced learning programs and gimmicks. For when we look at what early-childhood learning looks like with STEM, we may be surprised to find that often times it looks like regular child’s play on the surface, while underneath the appearance of play, a lot of what’s happening can reveal structure and the apprehension of rules and concepts.

The best way to determine whether certain toys are developing your baby’s STEM muscles is to identify what kinds of activities actually exercise these parts of the brain. And depending on your baby’s age and stage of mental development, you may not need any fancy specialty toys and games to activate your baby’s STEM skills. Preparing your baby for a STEM-driven world can be as simple as providing them toys that stimulate memory, patterns, associations, repetition, and other inductive reasoning skills. In this way, a STEM toy can be anything that a child uses to develop these skills.

But what are these skills exactly? And how can you foster them in a distinctly STEM context? Sometimes it can be difficult to identify whether or not your child is learning these skills, especially if they are pre-verbal. So let’s take a look at some of these core skills, and how as parents we can select toys that support these skills in a way that is sustainable and saves money!

A good set of blocks should have a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. This encourages your baby to experiment. And as anyone in a STEM field will tell you, experimentation is key. But this doesn’t mean your baby has to be keeping extensive notes, or anything that an actual scientist might do. With the right set of blocks and engaged play, STEM learning happens naturally. This can mean that your baby is learning to individualize and form definite ideas for each of the pieces. Some they might recognize as structural, others might occur to them as more ornamental. And in the process of playing, they’re spontaneously forming hypotheses about their blocks, familiarizing themselves with how they weigh and balance, as well as their other load-bearing capacities.

As well through practice and repetition, your baby will learn how to experiment scientifically. If your baby doesn’t do so on their own, try challenging your baby to repeat building certain block formations from previous play sessions. This will encourage your baby to form associations, use memory, and learn from past results. These are, after all, the basic principles of the scientific method.

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