A warm, evidence-led guide to the toys that genuinely support development at five, chosen by the world's oldest games company.
The best toy for a five-year-old is one that does less, not more. It invites the child to supply the imagination, the rules, the narrative and the effort, and in doing so builds the very capacities that will serve them for life. At five, children are crossing a remarkable threshold: they can hold a rule in mind, negotiate with a friend, persist through a challenge and reflect on what went wrong. A toy that meets them at that threshold, and asks a little more of them each time they return to it, is worth its weight in any material you care to name.
In practical terms, this means prioritising puzzles, building sets, simple board games, outdoor target games and traditional play objects made to last. Research by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff consistently shows that playful learning, structured around a child's own curiosity rather than a screen's agenda, produces stronger outcomes in language, problem-solving and self-regulation than passive entertainment. If you are looking for a shortlist, start here: a wooden puzzle with genuine challenge, a first board game with turns and rules, and something for the garden that demands aim, balance and laughter in roughly equal measure.
What the research says about play at five
Psychologist Adele Diamond's work on executive function demonstrates that games requiring children to hold rules in working memory, inhibit impulse and shift attention, precisely what a board game or turn-taking puzzle demands, are among the most effective non-academic tools for school readiness available to parents.
Five is a pivotal age. Children at this stage can follow multi-step instructions, understand that a game has winners and losers without necessarily dissolving into tears, and begin to read the intentions of their playmates. Jean Piaget described this period as the late preoperational stage moving toward concrete operations: children are beginning to think logically about physical objects and events, even if abstract reasoning is still some years away. Lev Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development is equally useful here: the best toys sit just beyond what a child can do alone, so that a small nudge from a parent or older sibling unlocks the next level of mastery.
Fine motor control is consolidating rapidly at five. Hands that once struggled with a three-piece puzzle can now manage interlocking pieces, small pegs, stacking rings in sequence and the grip required for a proper game of skittles. Socially, five-year-olds are beginning to sustain cooperative play for meaningful stretches, making this an ideal moment to introduce games that require genuine collaboration or friendly competition.
There is a measurable difference in how children engage with toys according to their material composition. A 2019 study by Anna Sosa published in JAMA Pediatrics found that electronic toys produced significantly fewer adult words, child vocalisations and conversational turns than wooden or traditional toys. In short, a wooden toy generates more talk between parent and child, and it is precisely that back-and-forth, what Dana Suskind calls the three Ts: tune in, talk more, take turns, that drives early language and cognitive development.
Wood also offers a quality of tactile feedback that plastic rarely matches. The weight, grain and warmth of a well-made wooden piece communicate something to a child's hands that a lightweight moulded component does not. Maria Montessori placed enormous value on the sensory quality of play materials, arguing that the hand is the instrument of the mind: when the material itself is pleasurable to touch, children return to it more often and attend to it more carefully.
Explore Jaques London wooden toys, crafted for hands that are learning to thinkAt five, the relationship between hand and brain is still being wired in earnest. Puzzles are among the most efficient tools available for this process. They demand spatial reasoning, visual discrimination, trial-and-error persistence and the fine pincer grip that underpins handwriting. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI study, which evaluated toys against developmental criteria across multiple domains, consistently rated construction and puzzle toys among the highest performers for cognitive and motor development in the early years.
The key is challenge calibrated to ability: a puzzle that is too easy will be completed once and abandoned; one that is slightly beyond reach will be returned to again and again. Look for puzzles with twenty to sixty pieces at this age, preferably with interlocking shapes that reward careful observation rather than guesswork.
A board game is a social contract in miniature. To play, a child must accept a rule they did not invent, wait their turn, absorb disappointment and continue. These are not trivial achievements. Kenneth Ginsburg, writing for the American Academy of Pediatrics, identifies play as the primary vehicle through which children build resilience, creativity and the social competencies required for healthy development. A simple game of lotto, snap, or a counting-based race game gives a five-year-old daily practice in all of these capacities without a single worksheet in sight.
Turn-taking and self-regulation
Adele Diamond's research identifies inhibitory control, the ability to wait and not act on immediate impulse, as one of the strongest predictors of long-term academic and social success. Every turn a child waits for at the board game table is a small deposit into that account.
Gross motor development does not pause because a child has started school. At five, children are refining balance, bilateral coordination and hand-eye precision through every throw, bowl and swing they take. Jaak Panksepp's neuroscientific work on play identifies physical, boisterous play as a primary emotional system in mammals: children who move freely and take managed physical risks are measurably less anxious and more socially fluent than those who are kept largely sedentary.
Garden skittles, target games and outdoor sets offer an ideal combination: they are simple enough to learn in minutes, complex enough to reward practice over months, and social enough to bring the whole family into the garden. Ellen Sandseter and Mariana Brussoni's research on risky outdoor play further suggests that children who are allowed to test their physical limits in managed outdoor environments develop stronger self-assessment skills and greater confidence in novel situations.
Browse Jaques London educational toys, designed to grow with your childFriedrich Froebel, who invented the kindergarten, understood that play between children is the laboratory of social life. Traditional games carry within them an entire curriculum of negotiation, fairness, reading facial expressions and recovering from conflict. A screen, however sophisticated, cannot replicate the moment when a five-year-old must look a friend in the eye and agree on a rule. Hart and Risley's landmark research on early language environments also reminds us that the conversational richness generated by shared physical play is a primary driver of vocabulary growth, far beyond what any solo activity can produce.
The evidence, gathered across decades of developmental research, points in a single direction: fewer, better toys outperform larger quantities of cheaper ones. Carly Dauch and colleagues found that toddlers played more creatively and with greater sustained attention when presented with four toys rather than sixteen. This finding holds at five. An open-ended toy, one that can be a castle today and a market stall tomorrow, generates far more developmental return than a single-function gadget that entertains briefly and then gathers dust.
When evaluating a toy, ask three questions. Does it require something of the child, or does it perform for them? Can it be played in multiple ways, alone and with others? Will it still offer a genuine challenge in six months' time? A toy that answers yes to all three is almost certainly worth the investment.
Jaques of London was established in 1795, making it the world's oldest games company. In that time it has invented croquet, created the Staunton chess set and supplied generations of families with games and toys built on a single conviction: that play, when it is well-made and well-considered, is one of the most serious things a child can do. Every piece in the Jaques range is designed to reward attention, encourage conversation and last long enough to be passed on. That is not a marketing claim. It is a two-hundred-year-old promise.
Entirely normal, and worth keeping in perspective. The WHO and the UK Chief Medical Officers both recommend limiting sedentary screen time for children in this age group, but the most effective approach is not removal but replacement. Introduce a physical toy alongside a screen session rather than instead of it, and play with your child for the first few minutes. Research by Dimitri Christakis and Jenny Radesky shows that the pull of screens is largely about novelty and instant feedback: a genuinely engaging physical toy, introduced with a little parental enthusiasm, can compete very effectively once a child has tasted what it offers.
The evidence suggests they are genuinely better, for specific and measurable reasons. Anna Sosa's peer-reviewed research found that wooden and traditional toys generated significantly more parent-child conversation than electronic alternatives. Montessori's principle that the quality of a material shapes the quality of attention it receives is borne out by observation across multiple studies. Wood is also more durable, more repairable and more likely to be passed between siblings or generations, which is a practical argument as much as a developmental one. That said, the decisive factor is always open-endedness: a well-designed wooden toy invites invention, while a poorly designed one of any material does not.
An entertaining toy does the work: it lights up, plays music, narrates a story. A developmental toy transfers the work to the child. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's research on playful learning draws a clear distinction between directed play, where an external agent supplies the content, and guided play, where a child follows their own curiosity within a structure the adult has provided. The latter produces stronger cognitive and language outcomes. In practical terms, a wooden puzzle that frustrates a child slightly and then yields to persistence is developing executive function; a toy that applauds every touch is simply providing stimulation. Both have their place, but only one builds capacity.
Considerably fewer than most households contain. Dauch and colleagues' research suggests that a smaller number of toys produces deeper, more creative engagement. A reasonable working collection for a five-year-old might include one good puzzle, one construction or building set, one or two board games suited to family play, an outdoor game and a collection of open-ended materials such as blocks or art supplies. Beyond that, additional toys tend to fragment attention rather than deepen it. The goal is not deprivation but curation: a small number of excellent things, chosen thoughtfully, will serve a child far better than a room full of novelty.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.