Stacking and nesting toys help a child develop ideas about size, shape, texture, weight, density, and distance. By encouraging exploration and manipulation, they can actually speed him toward mastery of large motor skills, like walking, and social skills, like talking.

Nesting toys--toys that fit together--emphasize relationship: there is big and bigger, small and smallest, bigger than, smaller than, and so on. Children usually respond to nesting toys between one and two years of age. By fitting one piece inside another, toddlers learn words that describe placement: over, under, in, out.

This is a great activity to introduce and develop spatial reasoning in young children, with emphasis on concepts of size, volume and rotation.

Steps:

1. Ask your child to put a toy IN another object (like a small ball in a toy car through its window)

2. Ask your child to bring the toy OUT again after he has completed the first instruction

3. For more advanced children, provide multiple objects that can be 'nested' into each other and have them 'guess' in which order they can 'fit' into each other