Exploration and play are closely linked in infants where, for example, discovering that a toy makes a noise leads to infants repeating the action that made the noise. Adults can influence an infant’s confidence about the world by encouraging and smiling at them when they approach an unfamiliar object or toy. When young babies watch a mobile they are constantly moving their head, arms, legs and even their mouths in response to the movement of the toy.

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Babies begin to learn about conversational turn-taking from an early age; if a baby is babbling the adult waits for a pause and then talks to the baby. Babies who handle shapes and also fit them through a hole are learning to solve problems through touch and sight. This enables the baby to continue with their experiment and learn more about cause and effect; babies learn a great deal through repetition and it is good to facilitate opportunities where babies can begin to understand that, for instance, a toy will always fall to the ground. The confidence to explore and discover new things develops during infancy and creates a healthy curiousity about the world throughout childhood. VTech Baby includes soft toys, rattles and sorting toys, all with the bright, easy, interactive elements that VTech is well known for.Once babies are either crawling or walking their mobility gives them more opportunities to explore their world. There’s also a great range of activity and play centres that grow with your baby, from lying to sitting, to standing or walking. During the first year of life infants’ visual development is rapid and they begin to identify objects through shape, colour and texture. Infants also learn about the links between sights, sounds and feel of toys when these are demonstrated by adults.

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From an early age babies use touch to investigate their world; as they learn to reach they begin to run their tongue and lips over toys and then look at them. This ability to recognise the direction that a sound is coming from improves greatly during the first few years of life. Sensory development in babies can be facilitated through toys that provide opportunities for them to experience sounds, visuals and textures.

Toys that are made of different materials and are different shapes stimulate young infants to grasp, mouth and shake them. The grasping, at first, is quite clumsy but through repetition, and across time, infants become adept at grasping and develop fine motor skills. If babies are presented with an unexpected event where, for example, a moving toy train disappears behind a screen but does not come out the other end they will stare for a long time at the screen. Giving babies plenty of opportunities to hear music, singing, rhythm and talk enhances their learning and prepares them for the social world where they will talk, sing, play and listen to music. Toys that name alphabet letters and everyday words satisfy young children’s need for repetition and rehearsal when practicing words and sounds.

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Make sure to check out the VTech Toot Toot range for incredible air, land or sea vehicles, animals and figures that interact with each other as well the brightly coloured, multi-layered Toot Toot playsets. Tactile stimulation and learning is also experienced when infants and young children feel the weight of a toy when they have filled it with water and then after they have poured the water away. After the first year, infants adopt the ‘pincer grasp’ where they use their thumb and index finger to grasp even very tiny objects. Bath toys that are small and lightweight so that young babies can grasp them are excellent stimulus materials. br /> As soon as babies are born they are influenced by what they hear around them and modify what they able to hear, accordingly.

For example, babies are beginning to understand that toys reliably fall to the ground and that if a toy train goes into a tunnel it will come out the other end. Children demonstrate that they have understood the concept of cause and effect when they talk about the consequence of actions. Young infants need to be presented with an adequate but not too great amount of sensory stimulation. As babies develop their auditory abilities narrow so that eventually babies are only sensitive to those sound categories specific to their native language.