The infant toy aisle is mostly a category invented by marketing — bright primary colours, plastic surfaces, and a noise on every press, optimised to look stimulating to the parent in the shop. Babies, watched in the careful detail that researchers like Elinor Goldschmied applied, often prefer the wooden spoon, the tin lid, and the silk scarf to the £20 activity centre. Once you know this, the kitchen drawer becomes a genuinely good toy shop, and the cost of "toys" for the first two years drops to roughly nothing.
This piece is the practical version of that idea — what to put in a treasure basket at 8 months, what to set up for heuristic play at 18 months, and which homemade things are worth bothering with vs. which are Pinterest theatre.
The Healthbooq app is useful for tracking the milestones these activities support: object permanence, palmar-to-pincer grasp, and early symbolic play.
Treasure Baskets (Roughly 6–12 Months)
Elinor Goldschmied's treasure basket is a low, sturdy, flat-bottomed basket — wicker, around 35 cm across — filled with around 60–80 everyday objects in a wide range of textures, weights, materials, and temperatures. The baby sits next to it (well-supported, not propped) and the adult sits nearby and does not interrupt. That last bit is the whole point. Babies will explore for 20–40 minutes, far longer than they ever play with toys you've shown them how to use.
What goes in:
- Wood: wooden spoon, lemon reamer, small bowl, clothes peg, cotton-reel
- Metal: small whisk, tin lid (no sharp edge), measuring spoons on a ring, bunch of keys
- Natural fibre: loofah, sea sponge, small length of rope, hairbrush with natural bristles
- Stone/shell: large smooth pebble, shell, cork
- Leather/rubber: purse, rubber doorstop, bath plug on a chain
- Fabric: silk scarf, velvet pouch, woollen pom-pom
What stays out:
- Anything with batteries, small parts, or that fails the choking-tube test (use the bottom of a roll of Sellotape — anything that fits inside is too small)
- Plastic — not for ideological reasons, but because it tends to be one note: same temperature, same weight, same soft sound
You don't have to follow Goldschmied to the letter. A £3 wicker basket from a charity shop, fifteen things from your kitchen, and an adult who manages not to demonstrate is the working version.
Heuristic Play (Roughly 12–24 Months)
Goldschmied and Sonia Jackson's follow-up: when babies stand and walk, they stop wanting to examine objects and start wanting to put things in and take things out of other things. Heuristic play sets out 5–6 categories of object, in quantity, on a clean floor, alongside containers — and the toddler does the rest.
A useful starter set:
- Tins — clean food tins (no sharp edges; a tin with a smooth top from a brand like Heinz is fine)
- Chains and rings — curtain rings, key rings, small lengths of dog chain
- Corks — a bag of wine corks
- Wooden pegs — clothes pegs, cotton-reels
- Lids — jam jar lids in various sizes
- Cardboard tubes — kitchen roll, posting tubes
- Pom-poms — fabric, larger than a 2.5 cm choking tube
- Containers — yoghurt pots, biscuit tins, old handbags, a cardboard box
Children fill, empty, line up, post, post again, transfer, sort, redistribute. A typical session runs 30–45 minutes. As with treasure baskets, the adult sits, watches, and doesn't suggest. When a session ends, you sweep everything back into bags and store. It is one of the calmest forms of toddler play, and the cheapest.
Pikler and the Case for Less
Emmi Pikler and her colleague Anna Tardos, working at the Lóczy infant care home in Budapest from the 1940s onwards, took an even more austere line. The Pikler position is that infants and toddlers do their best learning with their own bodies, and the role of "equipment" is mostly to support free movement: low climbing structures, simple wooden objects, space.
You don't need a Pikler triangle (although they're lovely if you can stretch to one — IKEA, John Lewis, and several small UK makers sell them in the £80–£200 range). You do need:
- Floor space, cleared
- A few open-ended objects within reach
- An adult who isn't intervening every 30 seconds
This is largely a stance, not a kit. But it's a useful corrective if you find yourself buying more "developmental" toys.
Things Worth Making
The list below filters the typical Pinterest pile down to what actually gets played with for more than five minutes.
Sensory bottles. Empty 500 ml clear plastic bottle. Fill with rice, dried lentils, glitter and water, oil and water with food colouring, or beads. Hot-glue the lid shut (this matters — without glue, the lid eventually comes off in a 14-month-old's hands). Store airtight, treat as a shake-and-watch toy, not an open-it-up toy.
Pasta in jars. Same logic. Penne in a Bonne Maman jar with the lid sealed shut is a brilliant rattle. Sealed shut, please — uncooked pasta is a choking hazard.
Posting boxes. Cut a slot in the lid of a shoebox or a Pringles tube. Provide pasta shapes, large buttons (over the choking-tube size), or pom-poms. The repetitive posting is the whole point.
Cardboard box anything. A delivery box from Argos, Tesco, or Amazon is a den, a car, a boat, a baby bed. Add holes, doors, scribbles. Replace when it falls apart. Cardboard outscores almost every shop-bought toy in observed playtime per pound.
Homemade playdough. 2 cups plain flour, 1 cup salt, 2 tbsp cream of tartar, 1 tbsp vegetable oil, 1.5 cups boiling water, food colouring. Cooks together in a pan in 3 minutes; lasts 2 months in an airtight tub. Costs about 30p a batch. The Lakeland silicon mat keeps it manageable. Salt content makes it unpleasant to eat, which is the safety mechanism — not "edible," just unappealing.
Sock puppets. Adult sock + buttons (sewn, not glued, for under-3s) + scrap fabric for ears. Mostly the adult plays with these, not the child — but the child watches with rapt attention, which is the point.
Magnetic fishing. Paperclips on cardboard fish + a stick + a string + a small magnet from Wilko or Hobbycraft (~£2). Fine motor and patience.
Personalised photo books. Print 20 phone photos of family, pets, regular places. Stick into a notebook. For under-2s this beats almost any commercial board book — the faces are familiar, and the book means something. (Photobox, Vistaprint, and Boots all do small soft-cover photo books for £6–£10 if cutting and sticking isn't your thing.)
Things That Sound Lovely But Aren't Worth Bothering With
The bit Pinterest doesn't tell you. These have low play-time-to-effort ratios:
- Texture books with sandpaper, velvet, etc., glued to card. Babies tend to lick rather than feel, and the sandpaper page is grim. The sensory-cloth ranges by Galt or Lamaze do the job better.
- Button boards. Buttons fall off; under-3s try to eat them. Skip until 4+, and even then a Hama bead set is more fun.
- Foam stickers stuck to walls. Dust magnet, paint magnet, and the foam tears.
- Marble runs from kitchen roll tubes. Collapse on the second use. A real Hape or Galt marble run (£15–£25) lasts years; the cardboard version lasts an afternoon.
- DIY parachutes. Idea is charming, attention span is 90 seconds.
Safety, Briefly
Homemade toys need the same safety eye as bought ones:
- Choking-tube test: anything that fits in the inner cylinder of a Sellotape roll is too small for under-3s. The proper choke-tester (around £2 online) is the same diameter as a 3-year-old's airway.
- Tin edges: check by running a finger around the rim; reject anything sharp.
- Glass: no glass jars in heuristic play; use plastic or metal containers.
- Glue: PVA only for items the child handles; hot-glue for sealing lids that should stay sealed.
- Strings and cords: keep under 22 cm for any object a baby can pull to themselves.
- Supervise treasure basket play actively — the materials are interesting precisely because they are not childproofed.
CE marking, Lion Mark, and the British Toy & Hobby Association standards exist on bought toys for a reason; replicate the spirit at home rather than the certificate.
Key Takeaways
Elinor Goldschmied invented the 'treasure basket' in the 1980s after watching how 6–12-month-olds played with everyday objects in NHS day nurseries — and her conclusion was that wooden, metal, and natural-fibre objects from the kitchen drawer engage babies more deeply than nearly any plastic toy. Heuristic play (Goldschmied & Jackson) for 12–24-month-olds extends the same idea: tins, chains, corks, fabric scraps. The Pikler approach of Emmi Pikler and Anna Tardos pushes further — the most useful play 'equipment' is a child's own movement and a small number of open-ended objects. None of this needs a Hobbycraft trip.
