13 Best Educational Toys For 8-Year-Olds In 2024

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While looking for a toy for an 8-year-old girl or boy, parents need to consider several factors, including their interests and abilities. In this article, we will be sharing some of the best educational toys for 8-year-olds that make learning an enjoyable process.

Children of this age usually go through an exponential growth spurt mentally, physically, and cognitively. And introducing them to these games can boost their critical thinking, problem-solving skills, intelligence, emotional skills, and reasoning. Moreover, the toys can encourage children to challenge themselves and keep them entertained for longer.

You can also introduce your child to various science kits, crafts, magnetic construction kits, and solar system models through these toys. These quality-tested toys help garner their interest and attention and make an excellent educational tool. To help you pick the right one, we have compiled a list of some popular educational toys from trusted brands apt for eight-year-olds.

13 Best Educational Toys For 8 Year Olds

1. Best Award-Winning: Osmo Genius Starter Kit For Fire Tablet – Classic

The award-winning educational game allows children to interact with actual handheld pieces and a Fire Tablet, which needs to be bought separately. It enables hands-on learning through five different apps— in Tangram, puzzle pieces have to be arranged to match shapes on the screen, while in Newton, items have to be placed in front of the screen, or lines are drawn to solve physics puzzles. Creative drawing skills are encouraged in Masterpiece, spelling, and vocabulary are enhanced in Words, while tiles are counted and multiplied to pop bubbles in Numbers. This educational puzzle game toy for eight-year-olds enhances mental skills as it has games that graduate from beginner to expert levels and give audio and visual feedback to children. Here’s a review video detailing a tester’s experience to help you know more about this product.

2. Best For Nature Learning: Dan&Darci Light-Up Terrarium Kit

Children are amazed by this miniature garden growing in a container and learn to appreciate the wonders of nature, science, and life. This all-inclusive kit for 8-year-old boys and girls helps them create their own terrarium that glows at night and grows by the day, thanks to the LED light under the lid. Just switch on the light and watch your terrarium turn into a beautiful lighted garden. The quality-tested kit includes a 4×6 inches terrarium jar with a light-up jar lid, vermiculite soil, river rocks, chia seeds, blue sand, wheatgrass, a micro USB charging cable, an instruction booklet, small mushroom and bunny miniatures, a spray bottle, removable stickers for decoration, and a wooden stick for planting the seeds. Working on such engaging projects helps improve interpersonal and social skills among children, encourage teamwork, and teach them the importance of responsibility.

3. Best For Fine Motor Skills:  CubicFun Race Tracks

The educational toy for eight-year-olds helps develop fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination and helps children understand the relationship between cause and effect. It comprises a large track with three mini toy cars— an ambulance, police car, and fire engine that must be guided through obstacles and eight challenges. This set has an in-built mechanical linkage track and six buttons to help you pass the challenges, enhancing manual dexterity. It is designed with bright colors to stimulate children’s color perception and visual skills. Trusted by parents, the product is made of premium, non-toxic ABS plastic material, non-toxic water-based paint, and has smooth corners and edges.

4. Best Weather Experiments: 4M Weather Science Kit

Challenge your child’s mind and help them understand how the weather works with six enthralling activities. Children can make clouds in their palms, understand how lightning is caused by static electricity, study acid rain and the greenhouse effect, build a water cycle model on the desktop, and watch wind produced by air currents. This developmental toy for eight-year-olds provides them with hours of fun and hands-on learning about green energy as they record weather patterns by building a workable weather station. This STEM toy from the award-winning Green Science line familiarizes children with green concepts and includes tools for weather experiments and instructions. For a more detailed review of this toy for 8-year-old boys and girls, here’s a video.

5. Best For Developing Spelling Skills: Liwin Let’s Go! Spelling Game

This educational toy for eight-year-olds comprises 52 colorful lowercase letters and 28 double-sided word cards to develop children’s right and left brains and strengthen their ability to recognize lowercase letters. Children learn through games, cartoons, and vivid and vibrant illustrations as they see a picture and try to spell the word. It cultivates an interest in learning and also enhances word recognition and hand-eye coordination. Cognitive skills, reading and spelling skills, concentration, and color recognition are all boosted with this game. It’s made of high-quality cardboard with a wooden core, and soft paper has rounded edges, can be easily grasped, and is non-toxic and safe for children. This tried-and-tested wooden reading and writing toy for 8-year-old girls and boys comes with a storage bag so that no pieces go missing.

6. Best For Hand-Eye Coordination: The Toy Pal Engineering Building Toys Set

The innovative toy for eight-year-olds enables them to build their own airplane, helicopter, racing car, motorcycle, construction truck, sling van, and robot. This seven-in-one toy comprises 163 pieces and has colored illustrations and instructions to guide you in your construction. It boosts interest in learning and fosters their analytical mind, making it one of the best gifts for kids. This durable toy is specially designed to develop hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, problem-solving skills, and logical thinking. It also promotes collaboration and teamwork, social skills, imagination, and creativity through interactive play. It’s child and environment-friendly, easy to clean, and includes a sturdy storage box. Made of safe and high-quality material, you can buy this skill-building set for your child with complete confidence as it conforms to high safety standards.

7. Best For Beginners:Snap Circuits Green Energy Electronics Exploration Kit

Boost your child’s STEM skills with the Green Energy electronics exploration kit by Snap Circuits. This educational toy for eight-year-olds contains more than 45 parts that turn into a solar-powered clock, a mini car, a talking device to communicate with your friends via Morse code, and more when assembled. In addition, each color-coded part snaps together on the included plastic grid, eliminating the need for complicated tools and soldering. The age recommendation for this set is eight years and above. It also includes a manual to teach your child about alternative energies such as hydro, geothermal, solar, hand-crank, and wind. Suitable for ages eight and above, the parts of this set are numbered and color-coded to facilitate easy assembly, making it an ideal gift for budding science enthusiasts. It is appropriately designed to promote scientific exploration among kids and to help them bond socially through teamwork.

8. Best Easy-To-Assemble: Kearui Robot Dog

This robotic dog is as close to a real dog if you don’t have one or you want your child to get comfortable with dogs. It barks when you touch its tail, and the light in its eyes changes with sound as it moves forward to interact with your child. This 35-piece smart robotic dog responds to commands and senses gestures— it can walk, slide, bark, sleep, yawn, move forward, and move backward. All the accessories to assemble the toy are available as per the manual, which makes it simple for children to assemble. This toy for eight-year-olds enhances eye-hand coordination, logical thinking, building skills, problem-solving skills, and creativity. Made with premium quality, non-toxic ABS plastic material, the pieces are sturdy, durable, and completely safe for children.

9. Best Interactive: Best Learning i-Poster My World Interactive Map

Engage your child’s developing and curious mind with this interactive world map by Best Learning. This geography toy teaches children about different countries, their cities, national flags, spoken languages, landmarks, and other important facts. Its five-level volume control and the repeat feature allow you to make the i-Poster repeat the facts and information at a desired volume. Use this interactive world map to improve children’s concentration, memory, and problem-solving skills.

10. Best For Brain Development: Tenhitoys Dinosaur Planet

Kids can get a clear understanding of Triceratops and T-Rex by assembling the parts themselves, and it also makes great crafts teaching equipment. It’s a hands-on activity that boosts their concentration, brain development, self-confidence, and imagination and reduces their screen time. The toy for eight-year-old boys and girls features three different dinosaurs with 51 pieces, and children can mix all the pieces together to make it more complex or to create their own unique dinosaur to hone their creativity and imagination. The parts are made of premium ABS material, have smooth edges, and are just the right size for children to build dinosaurs without hurting their hands.

11. Best Brain-Building: Melissa & Doug Smarty Pants 1st Grade Card Set

Encourage screen-free time and educate your child while engaging them with this educational card set by Melissa & Doug. The set of 120 brain-building cards is ideal for first graders as it offers a wide variety of quizzes, riddles, word games, fun facts, and other educational games that can help your child develop important skills and knowledge while building their self-confidence. Designed to suit the learning style and curriculum standards of every age range, it is child-friendly and ideal for fun yet educational play.

12. Best For Artistic Skills: Crayola Solar System Science Kit

The solar system science kit by Crayola is perfect for teaching children about the planets, stars, meteors, and other components of the solar system. This space-themed art and craft kit includes ten foam hemispheres for painting the planets and the sun, six color-washable paint strips, one paintbrush, one sticker sheet, one galaxy poster (9 x 13 inches) for mounting the painted solar system, and 25 double-sided stickers. As children paint the hemispheres according to the colors of the planets, they can learn important facts about each planet. It also makes for one of the perfect gifts for kids as they can display the project on the poster, giving them a tangible and educational piece of artwork to be proud of.

13. Best For Improving Memory: Zilloden 2-In-1 Educational Game

Specially designed for the educational requirements of children, this two-in-one matching game helps children recognize objects looking at pictures, or spell out words with letter cubes. This innovative educational toy for eight-year-old girls and boys enhances critical and logical thinking and lays a solid language foundation for your child. The matching pictures and words build cognitive thinking, improve memory skills, social skills, and spelling and vocabulary with word recognition, as children are able to establish a connection between objects and their names. This language learning toy comes with one matching tray, 20 number blocks, ten letter cubes, five mathematical symbol blocks, and 32 picture cards so that children learn object identification, alphabetic recognition, and how to form and spell words. Children can play loads of fun games with this math toy while learning in the process.

How To Choose The Right Educational Toys For 8-Year-Olds?

Here are a few tips on how to choose the right toy so that your child has both fun and a great learning experience.

1. Skill based and imaginative: At this age, children like toys that build skills, encourage imaginative and creative play, and introduce them to new hobbies. They also want it to be fun and enjoyable as that makes a new challenge less threatening. They like to spend a good amount of time playing games that develop skills and improve competency, and give them opportunities to interact with friends socially. Arts and crafts, musical instruments, team games, and social games all work well with this age group.

2. Keep them simple: Toys that don’t allow a child to use their own creativity and imagination tend to get boring for them. Stuffed animals and dolls that talk or sing don’t allow the child to direct the action and are limiting as far as the child is concerned. Critical thinking toys like blocks allow children to be spontaneous, creative, and exercise their logical thinking and reasoning skills.

3. Avoid electronic toys and video games: It’s impossible to keep children completely away from computers and other electronic gadgets. Such toys do not encourage children to think independently and can affect their attention span. Children who have an excess of electronic toys are not able to focus on a non-moving toy or a book.

4. Review them properly: A lot of toys claim to be educational and play on parents’ fears that compel them to buy these toys as they fear their child may fall behind. Some of these toys are fine but many claim to enhance brain development and create language experts, scientists, and mathematicians. You need to review them properly and ensure that they promote creativity and not get carried away by gizmos and flashy gadgets.

5. Personal interests of the child: Try to get a toy which caters to the interests of the child. Children of this age usually like toys that encourage large muscle activities like roller blading, biking, and ball games, or fine motor activities like jigsaw puzzles, drawing or wood work. They also enjoy toys that make use of reading, writing, simple math, nature, drawing, music, dance, crafts, simple science, and history games.

6. Learning toys: Toys that employ simple strategies and rules, word, match, and spelling games, puzzles, balance and scales, and mechanical models with levers, pulleys, and pendulums offer great learning opportunities to children. Science and weather kits, models of the solar system, human body, and physical world — educational board games arouse curiosity and are perfect for promoting learning. A microscope, binoculars, or telescope, protractor and calculator, apps or hand-held games for teaching graphics, math, music or story writing also are a good balance of learning and enjoyment.

7. Safety: Make sure the toys adhere to the strictest standards of safety and are made of non-toxic and harmless material, have no sharp points or edges, and carry the required safety gear.

Why Trust MomJunction?

Educational toys help to enhance the intelligence, critical thinking, and emotional skills in growing children. Based on the needs and interests of children, our in-house writer and product reviewer, Priti Bose, handpicked the best educational toys for eight-year-olds that will entertain and educate them. After an extensive online study, she described every recommended product in detail, discussing its features and benefits. Priti also provided a buying guide highlighting the factors to consider when purchasing these toys for your kid.

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