Your Kid’s Joy for Learning Will Be Reignited With These Educational Toys (2024)

When you have a perpetually bored kid on your hands, having a new activity for them consistently keeps you both sane.

Kiwi Crate is a subscription service that sends your kiddo age-appropriate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) projects for them to complete. Each project combines creativity and learning in a way that your kid will love. Plus, they’ll get a package in the mail every month addressed to them, and that’s super fun in and of itself.

Your kiddo will have a blast using this real working microscope to get a closer look at leaves, flowers, shells, and blades of grass under the magnifier. Designed to fit your toddler's tiny hands and face, they can grab any object to take a closer look and jot down their observations.

More: The Best Toys for Kids

Your little sous chef will be ready to whip up their favorite snack with this 22-piece kitchen accessories play set. So, now you can be the one demanding a snack every 5 minutes, even if it’s pretend snacks.

Whether you're adding this set to their existing play kitchen or using it on its own, your kiddo will serve you the tastiest imaginary food you've ever had.

You’re going to wish they made this mat in a grown-up size. This Aqua Magic Mat gives your kids a place to play and color without making a mess. It comes with stencils and writing utensils for clean, magical, artistic fun. Emphasis on the clean.

This particular mat happens to come with a ton of shapes, and has the alphabet on the perimeter of the map, elevating it from a creative art toy to something multidimensional.

Nothing like getting your kid started on their DIY journey early. This tool toy provides a ton of sensory input as well as providing them with the opportunity to learn how to use tools properly and safely.

The wooden sensory board comes with real tools, including insert screws, a double-sided screwdriver, a hex key, and a wrench. Now they’ll finally be able to help you build IKEA furniture.

Instead of Words With Friends, we call this one Words With Kids. This popular crossword puzzle game is perfect for kids 7 and up. It’s a race to see who can use up all of their letters first by creating words.

The water-resistant tiles pack up neatly into the banana-shaped tote for trips to the park, and its compact size doesn’t take up too much space at all.

The wheels on this cute bus don’t go ‘round and ‘round, but the whole magnetic set will allow your kids to explore the alphabet.

Place it on your fridge and let your tot insert any of the magnetic letter tiles into the open window. Press it once to hear the letter’s name and sound, and press it again to hear that letter used in a word and sentence. Hit the music note to sing along to the “Alphabet Song” and “Wheels on the Bus.”

Easily one of the best parts of high school biology is dissecting frogs and fetal pigs. You learn so much, and honestly, it's just super cool. While your little one is too young to be wielding scalpels, you can provide them with a similar experience with this dissection kit — only this one doesn’t smell like formaldehyde.

The toy includes a jelly-like frog, tools similar to what you'd use in a real lab, and all the internal parts of the frog along with explanations for each, all safely and without sharp edges. If your child prefers a different animal, they also have the choice of a bat, piranha, salamander, or dinosaur.

Is it super difficult to get your kiddo to calm down and pay attention? We hear you! Bring home an educational activity table so your little one can take all of that energy out in a productive way.

This musical table has more than 70 learning responses, sounds, and songs, plus activities that will increase your kid's knowledge of numbers, letters, colors, and shapes. It’s also a great stability tool for little ones who are just learning to stand.

Our kids are obsessed with everything offered by Osmo. They started out with this Little Genius Started Kit for iPad, which feels like a magical adventure.

The Osmo learning kit is a fusion of real-life block play with an iPad game and connectivity. It's a completely safe, closed system that helps teach your children things like numbers, the alphabet, and shapes. Whatever your child creates on the pad, Osmo instantly transfers it to the screen, which kids can’t get enough of.

This is the starter kit, which is perfect for kids ages 3 to 5, and it comes with multiple shaping blocks, the Osmo Base and reflector for your iPad, cardboard costume cutouts, and storage for the blocks.

There are entire Instagram pages dedicated to offering creative and unique ideas for Magna-Tile play. If your kids are as obsessed with magnetic tiles as ours are, they will be thrilled with this glow-in-the-dark set.

The set includes 16 pieces that glow in the dark, which might be an enticing way to get your little ones to stay in their room when they wake up before sunrise.

As a bonus, once your kids grow out of playing with blocks, they're super fun to hang on the fridge and play with while you wait for the water to boil.

If you want to give your kids a fun lesson in recycling, specifically all those torn-up pieces of paper they use for art projects, this toy is the one to get.

This paper maker uses bits of old paper to make new, beautiful paper that your kids can use for new artwork. It teaches them all about recycling and reusing, as well as evaporation and creation. It's so much fun, and your little artist will love it while ultimately saving money and trees. (Very small trees, but still trees.)

Whether you have a budding doctor at home or a kid who is fascinated by how the human body works, this magnetic wooden anatomy set from Melissa & Doug makes for a great learning toy.

From the skeleton and muscles to the happy face once it's complete, this is a wonderful introduction to learning the parts of the body while helping kids visualize the body’s organs and systems.