Best Educational Toys for 5-Year-Olds of 2023

Tap the stylus against the globe and hear one of thousands of educational facts about geography, geology, animals, habitat, and more.

For interactive fun, there’s a puzzle game, an “against the clock” challenge, and a quiz.

In addition, the base has a 2.7-inch screen on which you can watch over 600 custom videos from the BBC Wildlife team.

How can you incorporate learning while playing? Imagimake will help you!

Have your child become familiar with maps, shapes, and colors with this fun-to-play but interactive puzzle.

The puzzle includes the states in the US and the world.

Creativity meets tech with these fabulous little rings from Sphero.

Slip a Specdrum onto your finger and tap them against the included “play pad” to create music.

Alternatively, you can tap them on any surface, and the rings will create sounds in response to the surface’s color.

Download the app to your smartphone, tablet, or any other Bluetooth enabled MIDI device, and you can create music wherever you happen to be.

Landing at the sweet spot where affordability and price meet, this kit contains everything your child needs to begin exploring the wonderful world of nature.

Gently scoop up your bugs with the globe ended tongs and drop them into one of the bug boxes for observation. Then note your observations on the clipboard and pad.

Encourages observational skills and physical activity as well as a way to learn about our natural environment.

The Galt Toys Slime Lab has seven different scientific “experiments.”

The 16-page instruction booklet guides you and your child through the steps to make, among other things, a glow-in-the-dark slime alien and a bouncy slime ball.

The box has everything you need to carry all of the booklet’s experiments, so there’s no need to supplement the kit with other items, which we think is a huge bonus.

However, beware of the fart noise slime experiment. It induces unstoppable giggles.

Botley introduces the basic concepts of coding — the idea that you create a series of commands, send them to the robot, see what it does, and change your commands if the outcome is not what you wanted.

This set includes over 70 accessories so your child can build fun courses to send Botley through, including the programming device.

CoolToys Monkey Balance is a fun math game for children to play alone or with others. That means it’s good for an only child or for kids with siblings or a lot of friends.

It’s made with safe plastic materials which are BPA, lead, and phthalate-free.

The first challenges are appropriate for complete beginners and then become progressively more challenging. Now learning math should never look dull and boring with this game.

Open up the fun, bus-shaped storage box and discover 33 experiment instruction cards, a “data notebook” for your child to record their observations, a solar panel, a motor, an electrical buzzer, and more.

The kit asks questions and encourages your child to form a hypothesis, building on their experience from previous experiments and then testing their theories.

This set from Create With Clay has a trio of molded plastic dinosaur skeletons. It also has all of the clay you need to flesh them out and create three models, a T-Rex, a stegosaurus, and a triceratops.

The clay is non-toxic and non-staining, and there is also a pair of googly eyes for each dinosaur and two modeling tools.

With more than 110 brightly-colored pieces, this Robots In Motion set gives your child options. They can either follow the instructions and build one of the pre-designed robots or let their imagination run wild and design one of their own.

Finished robots are not motorized, so there’s no need for batteries. However, depending on the build, they do have plenty of fun and exciting moving parts.

The Merge Cube is a foam block that interacts with your smart device.

You aim your device’s camera at the block while you are holding it, and as you turn the block in your hand, the image on the screen will move in the same way.

This allows you to view things through the app on your phone, such as a globe, as if you were holding them.

This robust ladybug garden allows you to watch as larvae turn into ladybugs over the course of around four weeks.

Full instructions for the proper care of your larvae are included. Once you buy your larvae, which are not included, you transfer them to the habitat, and you can feed them through the smaller lid within the main lid, preventing escapees.

While this is not the highest quality multiple science experiment kit out there, it is a decent one for the price.

Along with a variety of basic items such as PVA glue and baking soda, the kit contains sturdy plastic test tubes with screw-on lids and a stand-in in which to place them. It also has a fun volcano, Petri dishes, and a beaker, all of which are reusable.

The experiments are interesting enough to capture a 5-year-old’s attention and demonstrate a range of scientific principles.

With an Squishy Circuits Dough kit, your child will learn about electricity while molding imaginative creations. There are instructions for making a range of models. Then, when your child is more confident, they can begin building models of their own.

There is a variety of LEDs and connectors, a battery holder, and batteries. The conductive dough set includes access to the mobile app, which has several step-by-step videos for additional projects.

With five levels of play, this fun game grows with your child.

The concept is simple. One person reads out a sight word, and the other players race to “swat” the fly-shaped card with the matching word.

There are five colors of card and bug, each with a different level of difficulty. It also includes several blank cards and two dry erase markers so you can use the words of your choice.

While this is a box of cards, plastic balls, and sticks, some kids will enjoy this for hours on end.

The cards show different 2D and 3D shapes for your child to recreate, as well as challenges connected to that shape. One card shows a cube and asks if you can build a bigger one.

Part of this toy’s beauty is that it can be used with cards or without for free-form play.

This is an excellent toy that introduces the concepts of force, motion, and direction to kids while they play.

The child operated seesaw catapult sends the ball flying through the air.

It’s up to your little one to work out how to make it pass through the hoops and land in either the goal cup or the target funnel.

Enjoy watching your ants create their city in this escape-free ant habitat from GeoSafari.

When closed, the colony is sealed to prevent escapees. It’s designed so you can provide your ants with the food and water they need through a small, escape-proof opening.

It comes with a dropper and a tunnel starter, but you do need to buy some play sand for the ants to live in.

One pen and two spiral-bound books combine to bring you 100 lessons in literacy covering spelling, punctuations, comprehension, vocabulary, and more.

Your child presses the Hot Dots pen on their answer in the book, the pen reads it out, and then tells your child if they are right or wrong.

Projects included in this box include a solar system mobile and a kaleidoscope, but that’s not all there is to this big box of space-themed crafts.

Add a pack of Oreos, and you’ll learn how to lick the cream off the center and create a diagram of the phases of the moon. Then there’s the board game you make yourself, the constellation streamer, and the rocket experiment to enjoy.

The central part of this toy is the “reactor lab” into which you drop the reactor pods. The pods sit in a beaker, and when you pump the liquid from the tubes to the beaker, there’s a chemical reaction that reveals a fun creature.

The set comes with two pods, and you can buy additional pods.

Plugo Tunes is a keyboard that you link to a tablet or smartphone. You place your device on the stand, in the play pad, set the keyboard on the mat, and you can learn musical notes as well as how to play over 50 tunes.

You need the internet to download the initial app, but once that’s done, you do not need any wi-fi, internet, or Bluetooth connectivity.

Circuit Explorers is a unique line of building toys with built-in connectors that allow your child to build exciting 3D circuits within toys that move and light-up. The instructional booklet is image-focused, so no reading is required.

There are multiple Circuit Explorers sets, which work alone or together, so if your child enjoys this set, you can always add more to the mix.

Use these realistic notes, coins, credit cards, and a checkbook to teach your child about money.

The items come in a storage tray and can be used as either a teaching tool in themselves or as part of a broader game, such as a pretend store.

We particularly enjoy using this set to demonstrate the differences in the prices of things our children would like.

Particularly useful for learning-averse kids, Sum Swamp is a hit in our home because our daughter doesn’t realize she’s practicing math.

As you work your way around the board, you encounter math challenges that require you to exercise your addition and subtraction muscles.

It is easy to learn how to play the game while being challenging enough to be a worthwhile learning experience.