Toys for learning numbers and letters

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My three year old is beginning to recognise some numbers and letters.

What are some good toys to help them develop this skill?

Following!

I wouldn't think toys are much good for this. They're mostly American and you can't see the mouth movement.

My dd enjoyed having a magnetic alphabet on our fridge and also a big alphabet jigsaw.

All the Orchard games are great at this age - you can often pick them up 2nd hand on Facebook or eBay.

My son loves this

https://www.johnlewis.com/melissa-doug-see-spell-wooden-learning-toy/p6357599?tmad=c&tmcampid=7&s_share=jlappios_Y29tLmFwcGxlLlVJS2l0LmFjdGl2aXR5Lk1haWw

Magnetic numbers and letters.
Alphabet/number puzzles.

But mainly, stickers, craft, drawing, reading and chatting are the best ways to teach numbers and letters; something active.

This is really lovely! Thank you

Any orchard games in particular you would recommend?

I had thought of some foam letters for the bath.

They like matching games, so I can see them enjoying learning to match the shapes of the letters / numbers (rather than trying to get them to form words necessarily).

Foam letters in the bathtub, magnet letters on the fridge, but more importantly, reading lots and lots of books to him and spotting the letters that are everywhere in your environment. Bring the purpose of reading to him.

For numbers, my son likes the ladybird one

www.playtimetoyshop.co.uk/product-page/the-game-of-ladybirds

https://amzn.eu/d/gaecC3c Vtech bus! The best ever

Oh yes we do masses of this already - but I just want to give them opportunities to ‘play’ with it a bit more beyond us reading together.

They love matching games and puzzles, so I can see with something letters / numbers related, they will probably start to recognise them quite quickly.

Thats what has triggered the question really - they’re often showing me that they’ve seen the first letter of their name on a street marking or sign.

That is very sweet - I will add that to my basket for Xmas shopping!

I don’t think they’ve tried dice before either.

I agree toys not so great for this. Any kind of letters they can trace or play with are good. Games like Snakes and Ladders where you roll a dice and count. Lots of board games for this age involve numbers or counting - just go and see what appeals at a local shop, because the same game mechanic is often repeated in various formats so you can tailor it to your own child's interests.

If you do TV, the series Numberblocks and Alphablocks on CBeebies are truly excellent. Very, very well made and the episodes aren't long. DS was mad about Numberblocks for a while and they do have some associated toys but I think they would only appeal if DC have seen the programme.

I would recommend watching Alphablocks just as an adult even if you don't want to introduce TV yet because it's very good at showing how to pronounce letter sounds phonetically. A lot of us grew up with things like Letterland where we learnt letter sounds as "ah, buh, cuh, duh" but the letter sounds are taught differently now, which is easy to understand with "aaaah, mmmmmm, lllllll, ssss" but most letters are a bit trickier to represent without the vowel being tacked on.

Orchard games
Alphabet lotto
Match and spell
Nutty counting
Giraffe in scarves

We also bought some rainbow bears for counting- from Amazon. Has lots of bears in different colours and cups and did things like find two redd bears and three blue bears. How many bears do we have type things ...

We bought magnetic letters and a small magnetic board to play with letters- make short words
And a Jacques of London game- has wooden letters and cards so you can spell the name- a matching game....