Best Gifts for 3-Year-Olds

We love our Yoto Mini. It’s an audio player and it is well-used. It’s so easy for kids to use. Kids just slot a card into the player and it plays music or a story or reads facts out to them.

We have the Frozen story card, lots of the Make Your Own cards, Cinderella and some 5 Minute Disney story cards. We have recorded family members reading stories on our phones and then put them on the cards for the girls to listen to.

It also comes with access to several free radio stations just for kids and Yoto Daily which is a podcast with activities, jokes and fun facts every day.

Our Mini has a pink adventure jacket with strap which you buy separately. I also put lots of our cards on a metal ring with plastic sticky hooks because we kept losing them.

We have done so many activities with our play tray. Ours comes with a stand and you can either have it on the floor or on the stand.

We made potions, done water play, planting, sand play, messy play and loads more activities on here.

I would highly recommend you get one of these.

They’re good for indoors or outdoors too!

This one is a hit with us. Just pop it in the water of your play tray or a large plant pot or bucket in direct sunlight and it sprays water up into the air for some fun water play.

Such a great activity to have out in the garden for your little ones.

My three-year-old loves the bin lorry when it comes past the house and it’s always a big event. She loves this toy too.

You can sort the little card bits of rubbish into the different wheelie bins and then load them onto the lorry.

Loads of fun!

This has to be one of the most played with toys so far this year for my three-year-old. She loves this.

She threads the food onto the skewers and can pretend to cook the food to give to us.

Great for language development and pretend play.

We got this for our 3-year-old for Christmas and she loves it. She can sit for ages cutting up leaves or pieces of scrap paper and it’s great for her fine motor skills in readiness for school.

Our 3-year-old had this for her birthday and she absolutely loves it. She can go round asking what pizza everyone wants and then dish it up for them. It’s a great piece of kit for pretend play.

This pizza cart is a big hit in our house with the other pizza set above. Our girls love to wheel it around and dish out their own homemade pizzas for us all.

Playdoh sets are so much fun! Rolling and squidging and making your own designs. Another great idea for building those muscles in little hands and helping to get them ready for writing when they’re bigger.

Nothing takes away from reading with my daughters but this just gives them that little bit of independence around books when they want to know the story but can’t read themselves.

These books are simple to understand for a three-year-old. Press the book button which corresponds to the front cover and then press the coloured buttons depending on which page they want to listen to.

This one is great for outdoors with water play.

I can’t find this exact water table to link to so have linked a similar one on Amazon.

Uno Junior has different levels of difficulty. We play on the beginner’s level where you take out all the special cards like +2 and change colour because they can be a bit hard to play straight away. You are left with colourful, beautifully designed jungle animal cards with numbers on. Children then match a card from their hand to the one in the discard pile and it’s the first to get rid of their hand who wins.

Brilliant for learning turn-taking and colour recognition.

A great game of 5 in a row on any large surface.

Take turns to place your coloured tile on the floor/table in order to try to get 5 in a row.

My 3-year-old is a whizz at this.

This introduces your little one to music and performing.

Ours love to sing into the microphone and I’ve even stuck some letter notes onto the keyboard for use when we start learning the keyboard properly. (Letters not included).

This is great for pretend play.

One side is a market stall where you can have toys or play food for sale, and the other side is a theatre stage so you can make your own puppet shows.

A great idea to extend their play if you have a little shop set up for them.

Our two love their dolls and pushchairs. They just keep wanting to add more to their collection! Dolls and pushchairs are great for both boys and girls. Why shouldn’t boys be allowed to show their caring side?!

This is a such a fun activity. We usually do this outside. I set it out on a table and my 3-year-old just loves doing her dishes.

This is such a great activity for little hands. They can either try to make the animals on the cards or they can make up their own things using the colourful wooden pieces.

The sense of achievement when my little one completes one of these is immense. Her face is just so happy and she’s so proud of herself!

This size of jigsaw is perfect for a 3-year-old. There are loads of different character ones in this style.

Tip: We love the 4 in a box and what we do is pop each individual jigsaw in a different food bag so it just makes it that little bit easier to make the jigsaws next time so you’re not searching through all the pieces each time. We also label the backs of them with the number of pieces in that jigsaw. So they are labelled 12, 16, 20 or 24.

The link goes to a similar one to this for Frozen 2.

Your 3-year-old will love this. You’ll be getting everything plastered and have all your broken bones fixed.

These LCD tablets are loads of fun. My two love to draw random things and ask me what it is. Or they draw something and tell me what it is. It’s also going to be great for practising writing on in the future. You can save one picture at a time or delete it ready for another doodle.

We’ve taken ours on a plane as it’s so lightweight and it keeps the kids occupied for ages.

This is great to get little ones being a bit more independent with their books. Each page has great illustrations which aren’t too busy and you are asked to find different images.

My three-year-old loves this.

It takes a little bit of time to set it up as you have to stick the sticky bits on yourself.

But our little one loves it. It’s soft so is a good choice of activity for car journeys and the bits seem to stay in the book (so far!) as they cling to it really well).

It’s such a great idea with the section of different clips too and there is loads of vocabulary inside too.

These can provide hours of open-ended enjoyment.

Set your kids a task or simply just give them the set to see what they can come up with.

It’s such a good idea to introduce your children to letters and numbers early on.

These magnetic letters are fun to play with on a fridge, on a baking tray or even hidden in sand.

The set I’m linking to has upper and lower case letters plus numbers too. It’s so important see all the ways of writing the letters.