Are you thinking of buying some Nesting Babies for a little person you love, or perhaps you have just bought your first set? Not only do our Nesting Babies look beautiful, but they are also bursting with learning and developmental potential for our little ones! So we have created this handy play and development guide for playing with our Nesting Babies.

Our Nesting Babies support your child’s fine and gross motor skills 

There are lots of activities which support a child to develop their pincer grip (that's the pinching type grip used to correctly hold a pen or pencil) but it’s also so important to work on the palm muscles in children’s hands. The good news is that our Nesting Babies work on both! Using their whole hand to separate the dolls, this gets those all-important palm muscles going, this is essential for learning to crawl, to push up to standing from a squat position, and strong palms support the more intricate skills that the thumb and forefinger are used for. To pick up the bottom or top of the dolls children can grasp the edges of the dolls with their thumb and fingers, this helps work the pincer movement. Children need these skills to be able to carry out almost all their self care tasks, from tying their shoe laces to managing dressing skills. It is also important to develop these skills to carry out tasks such as writing, using scissors, and typing on a keyboard so with your Nesting Babies, you’ll get lots of practise.

Nesting Babies teach children about capacity

Did you know you can use your nesting babies in water? Making them the perfect bath time and beach companions. There is little that can’t be learnt about capacity through using sand and water. Teaching children about concepts such as full, empty and half is really useful for them as they become more independent and will need these skills for example, at school when filling up their drink at lunch time. The bath is a great place to practice as they can overfill the cups and pratcie this sill without heaps of water for you to clear up!

Small World Play

Do you remember playing with Polly Pocket, a doll's house, or racing cars? All of these things are classed as ‘small world play’. Did you know that small-world play has some enormous benefits for your child’s development? Essentially, small-world play is pretend play with figures and dolls that encourage children to create playful and detailed worlds, in miniature form. Our Nesting Babies can be used in this kind of play as little characters who you can give voices to, and come up with a story. We have a blog on more small-world play ideas here.

Our Nesting Babies teach your children about size

From the biggest doll to our chiming bunnies there is plenty of opportunity for your little ones to learn about size with our Nesting Babies. Learning the language of size is such a useful skill for our children. It’s going to help them when learning maths, but, it is also going to help them with their everyday life and vocabulary. Some key words we recommend introducing when playing with your nesting babies are: ‘big, medium and small’, “bigger than” “smaller than” “biggest” “smallest” “too big” and “too small”. Using these in play is going to expand your child’s vocabulary and your child will be able to use these words when communicating with others and understand more complex concepts as well. There is also lots of opportunity to teach your children ‘positional language’, these are phrases such as ‘’next to’’, ‘’behind’’, and ‘’in front’’. You could try putting the chiming bunny in all different positions around the dolls and play ‘’Where’s the bunny?’’ using positional language.