Country Toys

Melissa & Doug’s First Bead Maze is a classic toy that will help teach your child visual tracking skills, fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and introduce the concepts of shape and color recognition as well as problem solving. Sturdy suction-cup base and 18 solid-wood beads that spin and slide along red and yellow wire pathways.

Melissa and Doug’s First Bead Maze comes with fun extension activities that include:

Identify a color and/or shape of bead and ask your child to move it along a specific wire

Ask your child to give you directions on how to move a specific bead along a wire

Ask your child to count the number of beads of a specific shape or color. For example:

“How many circle beads are there? How many blue beads?”

Encourage beginning counting skills by asking your child to count the individual beads as you move them along the wire

Melissa & Doug’s Classic First Bead Maze Toy a great way to encourage fine-motor skills through fun play!

Melissa & Doug Stack & Sort Board helps develop color and shape recognition, beginning counting skills, hand-eye coordination, visual discrimination, fine motor skills, sequencing and sorting skills.

Some extension activities you can do with your child include:

Ask your child to hand you a specific colored block.

Ask your child to hand you a specific shaped block.

Ask your child how many different colored blocks there are.

Ask your child what shape each color block is.

Make a simple pattern by placing a purple, a yellow and a red block in a row. Ask your child to replicate the pattern.

Ask your child to see how tall she/he can stack the blocks with them falling over. Count each block out loud as it is added to the stack.

Place a specific number of blocks in front of your child and ask him/her to count them.

Place four to six blocks in front of your child. Ask him/her to study the blocks. Take one block away while your child closes his/her eyes. Ask your child to open his/her eyes and tell you which block is missing. Challenge your child by increasing the number of blocks or by taking away more than one block.

Melissa & Doug Stack & Sort Board is a perfect first manipulative toy that kids will really enjoy!

Melissa & Doug’s Classic Wooden Abacus will help teach your child color and pattern recognition, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It also encourages problem solving and hand/eye coordination.

Some fun extension activities include:

Move any number of beads to one side of the frame. Ask your child to match your “move” on the wire below yours. This can also be done with a repetitive pattern-arrange the 10 beads in different groupings (3 beads, 1 bead, 3 beads, 1 bead, 2 beads) that the child can mimic on the wire below.

Move a certain number of beads to one side and ask your child to count how many beads you moved and how many remain on the other side. Or have your child count from one to one hundred as they move that number of beads on each of the ten wires.

Quickly move a certain number of beads to one side and have your child say how many were moved and what color they are as fast as they can (7 yellow beads, 4 red beads, etc.). See if they can put all 10 wires correct, or how many in a row can be answered correctly.

Have your child try to make simple shapes using beads on multiple wires-a square, triangle, rectangle, diamond, or a perfect straight or diagonal line.

Choose a number and determine how many different combinations you can find to achieve that sum. (Combinations  of ten would be 9+1, 8 divided by 2, 7+3, 6 divided by 4, 5+5, 4 divided by 6, 3+7, 2 divided by 8, 1 divided by 9).

There are many more fun extension activities you can do with your child that are included with the Melissa & Doug Abacus. A quality classic toy from Melissa & Doug made with quality that will last from one generation to the next.