20 Great Educational Toys for 3-Year-Olds

Matching shapes and sorting colors is a beautiful exercise with this preschool-size lightbox. Set the backlight to different colors and levels of brightness and add any of three design sheets to use with 60 translucent shapes, which come stored in a mesh bag. It’s fun for tracing, too, for kids who are learning to draw. Requires 6 AA batteries or a USB cord, not included.

I like how these blocks visually show the numeral, a matching number of dots, and that the blocks grow physically larger from 1 to 5. It promotes number sense, an innate knowledge that, for instance, four is twice as big as two. Kids stack blocks together and use the alligator measuring stick to help them do addition, counting all the way to 15.

Your 3-year-old can practice construction with this set, and you could introduce them to the difference between an isosceles and an equilateral triangle. It’s easier to sneak in the learning with the five cute animals grabbing attention, including a parent-and-baby polar bear set for pretend play. It works with any other Magna-Tiles they already have or receive in the future.

Is your 3-year-old ready for a puzzle? Surprisingly — yes! The key is that this wooden board has outlines of the shapes to help with matching. With 42 colorful pieces to flip over and turn this way and that to get them fitting correctly, this can be a brilliant tool for practicing patience, perseverance, and abstract thinking. There’s a payoff at the end, when they’ve completed the rocket-ship scene. Give them the gold star!

Here’s another way to build number sense: This funny scale demonstrates that 8 is heavier than 2, but if your child puts both the 6 and 2 blocks on one side, and 8 on the other, they even out to the same thing. There’s a sheet that offers some exercises you can do and talk about together.

So many lessons in a simple toy! Kids need to practice their grasp so that later it’s easier for them to hold a pencil or tie their shoes. Stringing these wooden beads helps, and it also works their concentration. If you challenge them to alternate colors, like blue-red-blue-red, they’ll begin to learn sequencing, which is an early math and coding skill. Plus you can talk about shapes and colors with these beads.

Your 3-year-old benefits from learning gross-motor skills, too, to be able to confidently get up and down stairs, or participate in group sports and other physical activities. This toy, a set of pretend stones you can use indoors or outdoors, challenges them to practice balance and navigate an obstacle course. Use it for a “the floor is lava” game and to compare sizes (there are three small, three large stones) and colors.

These kits are pricey, but hear me out. They are targeted exactly for your 3-year-old’s age and stage, and you can receive four kits spaced out every three months if you want an easy way to keep the toy box filled. (Or buy one kit, then cancel your subscription.) Each comes with high-quality Montessori-style toys, games, and a book, plus a play guide that gives you more ideas for age-appropriate activities at home.

What a sweet way to practice counting out pieces of fruit and identifying strawberries, blackberries, and peaches. There’s a felt pie pan, bottom crust, and top crust that can help a kid learn sequencing, too. And it’s baby-friendly, if there’s a younger sibling around.

These silicone suckers offer a different kind of 3D construction experience for 3-year-olds, who can build them up vertically, or out from the side of the bathtub horizontally. They stick on any flat, non-porous surface, and to each other. In addition to offering creative building, you can challenge your child to sort them by color. If they get dirty, they can go in the dishwasher. The starter set has 24 pieces, and there’s a $55 set with 50 pieces.

Tens of thousands of five-star Amazon reviews don’t lie: This is a great tool for early literacy. It works like a book to help kids learn to sight read, but it also has a voice that reads the words out loud. It plays funny sounds and spouts fun facts to keep a 3-year-old’s interest. It’s interactive, engaging, and easy to take on the go. There’s volume control, or you can turn it off, and the entire book works in either English or Spanish. Requires 2 AA batteries.

This affordable wooden alphabet puzzle features all 26 letters decorated to look like animals. Lift one up, and underneath you can see the word for what the critter is — the O is an owl, the B is a bee. It lets kids practice the alphabet, shape matching, and sight words, and the back of the board is a woodsy scene your 3-year-old can use as a make-believe playground for the animals.

VTech’s interactive desk looks like a little homework station, in case your 3-year-old wants to imitate a big sibling. Five desk pads help teach words, music, even biology (basic body parts) and nutrition (fruits). The LED pad is removable and works with a stylus to help your child practice tracing letters, numbers, and shapes. The top flips up to become an art easel, so they can go through an entire mini school day on this. Requires 4 AA batteries.

This helped my own kids so much when they were learning their letters — and I loved that it all stuck to the side of the fridge, giving us a toy to use in the kitchen when I was making meals. When a kid puts a letter in the apple, Tad sings about it. There are three levels of play, gradually moving from identifying the letter and its sound to suggesting words that start with it. Requires 3 AA batteries.

When your preschooler is ready to put letters together to form short words, these preschool-quality magnetic tiles are a fun tool. Start by showing them how to spell their name. Each tile has the uppercase letter on one side, lowercase letter on the other, so it’s also an opportunity to explain that all names, and all sentences, start with the big letter.

Twenty-six little Popsicles are fun manipulatives for practicing fine-motor skills, with a surprise. Each colored top with a letter pops off to reveal a word underneath that starts with that letter, so that the N popsicle reads “nest” underneath, and so on.

Baking is known for requiring being able to think in fractions and for needing to follow directions, and 3-year-olds can get lots of non-messy practice with both when they play with this wooden toy. The butter divides in four, the eggs divide in half, and “batter” pompoms can be swirled around in the mixer, which really rotates. In the end kids get to serve up a pretend cake with four candles and four individual slices.

It’s a talking pizza cart! Kids follow instructions to put on purple onion or yellow pineapple toppings, set a timer while their pizza bakes, and count the money they make from each sale. They also learn visually what it is to divide a circle into four equal parts. There are lots of other fun surprises, like that the spinning pizza turntable activates music. Requires 3 AA batteries.

Two to four players work to collect acorns in this preschool game. Your 3-year-old practices fine-motor skills by using the squirrel squeezer (which works like a set of tongs) to pick up acorns that match the colors on their log. It involves turn-taking, counting, and concentration, but it’s also really, really cute.

Kids learn to follow directions and count, all while pretending to work this ice cream counter. A booklet shows what one, two, or three scoops looks like, alongside the words and numbers, to help them start to put the word “two” and the concept of 2 together. There are eight different ice creams and six pretend toppings, plus a cup, a cone, and pretend money to play with.