Top 9 'Schema-Supporting' Educational Toys to explore for toddlers in their crucial 'Little Scientist' phase - Goh Ling Yong
Have you ever watched your toddler with a mix of awe and bewilderment? One minute they're meticulously lining up every single toy car they own. The next, they're gleefully emptying a full basket of laundry onto the floor, one sock at a time. Or maybe you're in the "everything must be thrown" phase, where mealtimes feel less like a family gathering and more like a physics experiment with spaghetti.
If this sounds familiar, congratulations! You're not raising a tiny tornado set on creating chaos; you're raising a "Little Scientist." This seemingly random, often messy, behavior is actually your toddler's brain hard at work. They are exploring the world through powerful, innate urges called schemas. Think of schemas as your child's learning software—repeated patterns of action that help them build a mental blueprint of how the world works. The child who drops their cup from the highchair over and over isn't trying to annoy you; they're studying the schema of trajectory and gravity.
Understanding these schemas is a parenting superpower. It allows you to reframe frustrating behavior as crucial learning. Better yet, it helps you provide the right tools to support their investigations. Instead of fighting these urges, we can lean into them with "schema-supporting" toys. These aren't necessarily fancy, expensive gadgets. In fact, the best ones are often the simplest, most open-ended toys that allow your child to explore their current schema obsession in a constructive way. Ready to upgrade your playroom to a full-blown learning laboratory?
Here are the top 9 schema-supporting educational toys to nurture your toddler's inner scientist.
1. The Humble (But Mighty) Wooden Block Set
There's a reason wooden blocks have been a playroom staple for generations. They are the ultimate open-ended toy, perfectly designed to support a huge range of schemas. For the toddler obsessed with stacking things as high as possible before they crash down, blocks support the positioning and trajectory schemas. For the child carefully building walls and fences around their toy animals, blocks are a tool for exploring the enveloping and connecting schemas.
Unlike a toy that does one specific thing, a simple set of unpainted wooden blocks can be anything. A phone, a piece of food, a car, a tower, a bridge. This ambiguity is where the magic happens. It forces your child's imagination to fire on all cylinders, developing creativity, spatial reasoning, and problem-solving skills. They learn about gravity, balance, and geometry without ever opening a textbook. It's pure, hands-on discovery.
Pro-Tip: Don't just hand over the box. Sit on the floor and build alongside your child. You can introduce new ideas by building a long, flat road (connecting) or sorting the blocks by shape (ordering). Ask open-ended questions like, "I wonder how tall we can make it?" or "What happens if we put the small block on the bottom?"
2. Nesting Cups, Rings, and Rainbows
Is your toddler fascinated with putting things inside other things? Do they love fitting lids on pots or putting all the little toys into one big box? This is the enveloping and containing schema in action, and nesting toys are its perfect companion. Whether it's a classic set of stacking rings, colorful nesting cups, or a beautiful wooden rainbow, these toys are all about exploring size, scale, and spatial relationships.
The simple act of fitting one piece inside or on top of another teaches profound concepts. Your child is learning "bigger than," "smaller than," "inside," and "outside." They are developing hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills as they manipulate the pieces to get that satisfying "perfect fit." This is also a fantastic tool for developing focus and persistence, as they work to figure out the correct sequence.
Pro-Tip: Take these toys beyond simple stacking. Use nesting cups in the bath to explore sinking, floating, and pouring (trajectory). Hide a small pebble under one of the cups and play a memory game. Use the arches of a wooden rainbow as tunnels for cars or cradles for dolls.
3. The Ever-Versatile Play Silk
If you want a toy that offers maximum play value for its simplicity, look no further than a set of large play silks or fabric squares. For a toddler, a piece of flowing, colorful fabric is a canvas for limitless imagination. It can be a cape for a superhero, a blanket for a teddy bear, or a roof for a fort, making it perfect for the enveloping schema.
Play silks are also wonderful for the connecting schema. Toddlers can practice tying simple knots, connecting one silk to another, or fastening them to a chair to build a den. And for the child exploring trajectory, a lightweight silk is a joy to throw up in the air and watch as it floats gently down. This provides different sensory feedback than a heavy ball, enriching their understanding of how different objects move through space.
Pro-Tip: Use silks for a living room dance party to explore movement and flow. Play peek-a-boo to reinforce object permanence. Or, simply put a few in a "treasure basket" and watch to see what your child comes up with on their own.
4. The Ultimate Sensory Station: A Water or Sand Table
If your little scientist is deep in the transporting schema—constantly moving items from one place to another—a water or sand table will be their happy place. This is a designated "yes" zone for messy, hands-on exploration that can save your sanity (and your pot plants). Here, they can scoop, pour, dump, and carry to their heart's content.
A water/sand table is a sensory powerhouse. It supports the containing schema (filling a bucket), the trajectory schema (pouring water from up high), and even the transforming schema (what happens when you mix sand and water?). Children learn about cause and effect, volume, and the properties of different materials in the most engaging way possible. The sensory experience of splashing water or sifting sand can also be incredibly calming and regulating for a toddler's busy system.
Pro-Tip: You don't need a fancy table—a large, shallow storage bin works just as well. Enhance the play by adding tools like funnels, scoops, jugs, and sponges. For an extra layer of discovery, freeze some small, water-safe toys in a block of ice and provide them with tools to excavate their treasures.
5. A Simple Basket of Balls
Never underestimate the developmental power of a simple ball. It is the quintessential toy for exploring the trajectory schema. Rolling, throwing, bouncing, dropping, and kicking a ball are all fundamental experiments in motion, force, and gravity. A child who throws a ball against a wall is learning about action and reaction. A child who rolls it down a slide is learning about angles and momentum.
The key is to offer variety. A collection of balls in different sizes, weights, and textures provides a richer learning experience. A heavy basketball feels and moves differently than a light, bouncy tennis ball or a bumpy, sensory ball. This variety allows your child to conduct a wider range of experiments and build a more sophisticated understanding of physics. This is also a fantastic way to develop gross motor skills, balance, and coordination.
Pro-Tip: Create a simple ramp out of a large piece of cardboard or a flattened box. Experiment with which balls roll faster or farther. This turns passive play into an active scientific investigation.
6. Ramps, Tracks, and Things That Go
For the toddler captivated by things that roll, slide, and race, a set of toy vehicles, ramps, and tracks is an absolute must-have. This type of play is a deep dive into the trajectory and rotation schemas. Your child isn't just "playing cars"; they are exploring concepts of speed, gravity, and cause and effect.
Watching a car zoom down a ramp they built themselves is an empowering and educational experience. If they have toy trains with magnetic couplers, they are also engaging their connecting schema, figuring out how to link the carriages together to form a whole. This kind of play builds critical thinking and engineering skills as they experiment with the height and angle of their ramps to make the cars go faster or farther.
Pro-Tip: Combine your car set with your wooden blocks to build elaborate cities, bridges, and tunnels. This encourages multi-schema play, blending trajectory, connecting, and enveloping all at once.
7. Posting Boxes and Lacing Beads
Have you noticed your toddler trying to fit objects into small spaces? Perhaps they're pushing coins into the DVD player or dropping food through the cracks in the deck. This is the posting schema, a subset of the enveloping schema, and it's all about understanding object permanence and spatial awareness.
Posting and threading toys are designed specifically for this urge. A simple wooden box with shaped holes and corresponding blocks, or a set of large wooden beads with a thick lace, provides a perfect outlet. These toys are incredible for developing fine motor skills, pincer grasp, and hand-eye coordination. They also require intense focus and problem-solving, teaching your child about orientation—how to turn and manipulate an object to make it fit.
Pro-Tip: You can easily DIY a posting toy! Cut a hole in the lid of a cardboard box or an old formula tin and provide your toddler with safe objects to post, like large pom-poms, milk bottle caps, or chunky craft sticks.
8. A Treasure Basket of Loose Parts
This is perhaps the most powerful and versatile "toy" on the list. The concept of "loose parts" refers to any collection of open-ended materials that children can move, manipulate, and combine in endless ways. This is a topic that my colleague Goh Ling Yong and I are particularly passionate about because it places the child in the driver's seat of their own learning.
A treasure basket for a toddler could include large, smooth stones, pinecones, shells, wooden rings, bottle caps, and scraps of different fabrics. These items can support nearly every schema: they can be moved from one container to another (transporting), lined up in a row (positioning), sorted by type (ordering), or used to build a structure (connecting). Because there is no "right" way to play with loose parts, they ignite creativity, critical thinking, and imagination.
A crucial safety note: Always ensure that all items in a loose parts collection are large enough not to be a choking hazard. Play should always be supervised.
Pro-Tip: Provide a variety of containers along with the loose parts—baskets, bowls, egg cartons, and small boxes. This invites your child to sort, classify, and contain the items, adding another rich layer to their play.
9. Ingenious Contraptions: Buckets and Pulleys
For a slightly older toddler who has a firm grasp on transporting objects, introducing a simple machine like a pulley can blow their mind in the best way possible. This can be as simple as a small bucket tied to a long rope, which you then loop over a sturdy, low-hanging tree branch or a stair railing.
This simple setup is a masterclass in the transporting, trajectory, and rotation schemas. Your toddler will be fascinated by the cause-and-effect relationship: "When I pull the rope down, the bucket goes up!" They can spend ages loading the bucket with their loose parts or other small toys and hoisting them up and down. This is physics, engineering, and heavy-duty problem-solving disguised as pure, unadulterated fun.
Pro-Tip: Start by demonstrating how it works, then let them take the lead. This is an excellent activity for cooperative play with a friend or sibling, as they work together to load and operate their new "elevator."
Observing your child through the lens of schemas is a true game-changer. It transforms moments of frustration into moments of wonder. That endless emptying of the toy box is no longer just a mess; it's a deep exploration of containing and enveloping. The constant lining up of dinosaurs is a master's thesis on positioning and ordering.
By intentionally choosing toys that support these deep, biological urges to learn, you are not just keeping your child busy. You are validating their work. You are providing them with the exact tools they need to build their understanding of the world, one thrown, stacked, and transported object at a time. You are honoring their role as the brilliant little scientist they were born to be.
Now I'd love to hear from you. Which schema is currently running your household? Share your little scientist's latest discoveries in the comments below
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
Stay updated with the latest posts and insights by following on your favorite platform!