Best Bath Toys?

We have the foam letters and the foam cars & road - the boys (4 & 1) love them. The 1yr old chews on them and the 4 yr old sticks them to the wall and drives on the tub and up the wall. Also a mirror is fun, especially with bubbles so they can see the way they look with bubbles on their head, chin, etc. Avon also has roll-on soaps. It looks like deodorant but is colored soap and they love to "draw" on each other. We have fun with the letters by making up things for the letter to do. Ex: 'M' is usually a Monster so it chases the cars around, 'D' is a Dog so it barks, etc . . .

My almost 4 year old's favorites are still cups - we have some with drain holes in them we bought at Babies R Us. And some stackable ones that he uses. He also likes just regular old plastic cups - like the kind you get at a baseball game or from a kids meal. I don't feel bad about those cracking and having to send them to the recycle bin. He also loves that foaming soap that comes in a shaving cream type can and tub crayons but I think we waited till he was almost 3 before giving him those. If the crayons sit in the water they get gross. Also I give him my empty shower gel bottles or empty shampoo bottles as squirt bottles. (These also work as his favorite pool toys.)

We have alphabet letters that stick to the tub walls and are quite large, so no choking hazard. I no longer use the squirt toys, since they get moldy very fast inside from not draining. We have stackable plastic cups with animals on them and that's pretty much it!

With a 4 and 1 year old, we've tried lots of bath toys. The ones that are the absolute best for our little ones are bowls, measuring cups, measuring spoons, spatulas, whisks, etc. They entertain them far better than anything else, are cheap and encourage imaginative play!

In our home, these were the winners:
1. Foam Letters
2. Pots and cups (to pour and cook)
3. Bubbles
4. Occasional Food Coloring

Those things kept my kids happy for EVER!

My kids like cups the best. But, the foam letters are also fun when they are learning their letters.

J.,

Coming from a teacher... it's never too early to expose them to MEASUREMENT... The tub's a GREAT place to start. Get them a set (or several! in different shapes and colors!) of measuring cups and spoons. They can have fun in the tub counting the teaspoons in a tablespoon, Cups in a pint. Look at how many 1/4ths is in a 1cup...and etc... They might be too young to understand everything, but it's certainly a great place to start exposing them... and measurement is always a challenge in our math curriculum.

Side note: Drop a $0.99 retractable sewing tape in their stocking, and on Christmas Morning you can keep your school-agers busy measuring everything from the christmas tree's height to the hamster's tail...PLEASE, get one with Metric as well as customary measurments; and keep it going all year.

Measure the dog's toenail before you trim, your child's earlobe, dad's nosehair(ewww, but the kids LOVE that sort of thing...LOL), the valve stem on the car, wiper blades, tire tread/width. Circumference of the tree in the yard, height of the fence, or the length of the grass... The diameter of the dryer opening. Area of the french toast for breakfast, length of green beans. Measure EVERYTHING...

You child's teacher will probably nominate you for the golden parent award!! Keep a measurement scavenger hunt handy for rainy days. Make a list of things to measure and send your school age kids on the hunt. It'll keep them busy AND learning at home. You can move from straight measurements to figuring the area of the bed, for a new quilt, and the volume of the bathtub or aquarium. These are HARD concepts for us to get across, but so much fun to play with at home.

:-)

T.

My son (4) has always loved playing with "regular" toys in the bath. We allow him to take his small hard plastic super heroes or animals in the tub, the ones with no joints or holes so no water gets in them. I also went and got a couple of $1 squirt bottles from the travel section. I also go through the pool toys and water toys section to see I can find anything like small water footballs and such.

We've always loved measuring cups and spoons in the bathtub. My daughter also likes to take the little people and animals from her old Fisher-Price playsets (preschool and Noah's Ark) so she can give them swimming lessons in the tub. The actual "bath toys" that we've received as gifts over the years haven't been as successful, even the amazingly cool bathtub xylophone (which I personally loved!).

Alex makes some cute stuff that doesn't collect water. My son loves the car & road one ( http://www.amazon.com/Rub-Dub-Stickers-Tub-Beep/dp/B00021... ).