The Best Toys for Six-Month-Old Babies
It is important to provide babies with age-appropriate toys to assist in stimulating their development without frustrating or confusing them with toys that are either overly complicated or boring. It is also imperative to select toys for your baby that are safe. Six-month-old babies should have toys that enhance the development of gross motor skills, and toys should be free of sharp edges because most babies this age like to put everything in their mouths to relieve the pressure of teething.
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Imitative Toys
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Six-month-old babies learn by imitating their parents and caregivers. They enjoy toys that simulate common household objects or electronics that their caretakers use in front of them on a daily basis. Toy keys, cell phones, mixing bowls and pots and pans are recommended over letting your baby play with the real objects because of safety issues. Real car keys are often dirty and pots and pans have sharp edges. You don't want your 6-month-old playing with your cell phone because it is expensive to replace if your baby accidentally breaks it.
Stacking Toys
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These toys promote the essential development of hand-eye coordination and color and shape recognition skills. Through stacking toys your baby will learn to have enough coordination to eventually balance stacking objects in order of size. Nesting toys can also fall under this category, they are simply placed inside of one another as opposed to on top of each other. Stacking toys are usually rings that go over a cone, and nesting toys are usually boxes or cups that fit inside of each other. Oppenheimer Toy Portfolio choose the Green Toys Stacker as one of the best toys for infants in 2010. This stacker is constructed from recycled milk jugs, which are free of BPA and phthalates.
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Rolling Toys
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Toys that roll can help encourage and strengthen crawling skills. Balls and soft rolling blocks are available in a variety of shapes and sizes, featuring music, mirrors, teething toys and textures. The Oppenheimer Toy Review selected the Rubbabu Funky Ball Assortment and the Guess How Much I Love You Soft Developmental Block for the Best Toys of 2010. The ball assortment features small balls, each having a different texture and color. The developmental block has a slot where you can put a picture of yourself, a mirror, a teething toy, various textures and illustrations from the correlating story book, "Guess How Much I Love You." You can encourage game play with these toys by rolling the toy to your baby and then letting him roll it back to you.
Comforting Toys
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Six-month-old babies begin to develop more of a relationship with their toys, learning to gain comfort from them. This is especially true at nap times and bedtime when your baby is more likely to be separated from caregivers sleeping alone in the crib. Oppenheimer selected the Guess How Much I Love You Nutbrown Hare Blanket Buddy as one of the best toys of 2010. This mini blanket doubles as a small bunny hand puppet. Ideally try to find stuffed animals and toys with minimal or no attached parts. Plastic eyes and buttons can come off of dolls and stuffed animals easily and babies this age can choke on these small parts. Ugly Dolls are soft stuffed animals covered in fleece with no attachments that Oppenheimer also choose for one of the best toys of 2010.
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