Best toys for 5 year olds for learning and imaginative play (2024)

Cottage Garden

Give your five year old their own special outdoor sanctuary with this delightful forest school-inspired den building kit. Packaged up inside a cotton lavender haversack (very Famous Five), you’ll find everything you need to enjoy a day in the great outdoors. This includes a tough purple tarpaulin, a waterproof groundsheet, tent pegs, 10m of jute rope, a coppiced wood mallet, 3m of colourful cotton bunting, plus a beech “fly eye” kaleidoscope and nature and information cards.

What we really loved about this kit was that there weren’t specific instructions for building (just inspiration and tips for tying knots), so you really do have to get creative and work with the natural world around you.

Our little team of testers loved finding sticks to prop up the den and tying the bunting up between the trees. Whether you take this unique toy along with you for a walk in the woods or just sling it up in the back garden, it will transport little ones away into a world of adventure.

Muddy Puddles

Designed in Ireland, these gorgeous dress-up dolls are inspired by kids and made to celebrate the magic of childhood. Based on the average proportions of a nine-year-old (rather than an adult), these dolls celebrate body positivity and diversity.

We tested the Muddy Puddles doll which comes with an adorable sunshine-yellow raincoat and welly boots. There’s lovely attention to detail in the clothes and her hair is super soft – it also remained tangle-free despite a fair amount of “styling”. The doll is quite small, but she was ideal for our five year old tester to play with and they loved dressing and undressing her.

Galt

Is there anything a five year old loves more than slime? Well, actually yes – making their own slime (especially if they can then use it to make farting noises).

This affordable set from toy masters, Galt, provides a ton of fun with a few simple ingredients. The kit contains a pot of glow-in-the-dark slime, bouncing putty, noise pot, slime and putty powders, pipette, notebook, a bug and an alien mould, plus an easy-to-follow lab book. You can get started straight away, by simply playing with the existing putty or starting to make your own. Fair warning, the kit does assume you have a few ingredients at home, including cornflour and PVA glue, so you do need to prep a little, however our tester managed to create something resembling slime with very little assistance.

Playmobil

Calling all nee-naw fans, this incredible set from the clever folks at Playmobil features so many fun touches and encourages many hours of wonderful imaginary play.

The flashing lights and wailing siren are instantly attractive to any five year old (although, worth knowing that batteries aren’t included, so you’ll need to have some ready!), but it’s the incredible mini details on this toy that’ll keep young children playing for hours on end.

We loved the removable roof, the foldable stretcher, the teeny surgical instruments, IV bottle and tube and the brilliantly-accurate Lycra-clad cyclist. We also found it a great tool for opening up some larger conversations, particularly around road safety.

Xootz

If you’ve got a wannabe skater on your hands and are not sure where to start with kit, your first stop has to be Xootz. We loved this Sketch Ya Deck board as it’s affordable, unique and a sturdy platform for beginners to find their feet.

The board itself has a short 28" deck made of durable 9-ply maple, which feels very light and smooth, PVC wheels – ideal for mastering the basics. This skateboard also comes with a black and white deck and four permanent colour markers, so your five year old can get customising. It’s a lot of fun to colour in the little characters and it has the added bonus of making the child feel proud and comfortable with their board, before they’ve even stepped on it. We also loved that it came fully assembled so there’s no faffing around with toolkits and instructions.

Botley

Develop your five year old’s STEM skills with Botley the (ridiculously cute) Coding Robot. Designed to engage young children in problem solving and critical thinking, the toy works by using a remote to programme in steps, which then tells Botley to perform a range of different activities, including zooming around, detecting objects and making noises.

To get Botley moving, this set also comes with a load of accessories, including cones, balls, a goal, cubes, flags, coding cards for visualisation and six boards. We loved that unlike other toys on the market, Botley is a completely screen-free coding toy – you don’t even need an app to set it up – and with a little guidance our five year old picked up the sequencing surprisingly quickly.

VTech

Not all marble runs are created equal – as this brilliant toy from VTech proves. Featuring jumps, canons, sounds, lights and even an electronic ferris wheel, it is quite simply, a dream toy for any five year old. There are 128 different construction pieces to put together and they are all colour coded which means it’s all fairly straightforward for little (and big!) people.

Once it’s up, it’s really solid and it won’t topple over or break - even with lots of enthusiastic races on the go. The marbles themselves are bigger and lighter than normal marbles (the set comes with 10), so it’s easier to accomplish all the stunts. There are three main configurations to try out, but you can also scan a QR code for lots more suggestions, so there’s plenty of ways to play.

Schleich

Five year olds will go wild for this beautiful, hand painted playset which features a ranger station, a tree with platform and slide, a suitably treacherous suspension bridge, rope ladder, an earth mound with burrow, a black panther, a crocodile, two little tortoises, a baby gorilla, and Ranger Steve, plus all his cool kit including a satellite telephone, torch and binoculars.

There are so many fun details to discover with this toy, such as the “rotten” planks on the bridge, which can suddenly drop, and the swivelling crane to lift essentials up into the station. Our tester loved giving Steve all his various accessories to carry around and making the scary croc come snapping out of the burrow.

Hape

Calling all mini astronauts! It’s time to expand your knowledge of the universe with this high-quality, 102-piece puzzle. The round shape and colourful illustrations make it instantly appealing, yet still pretty challenging for five year olds (and 35 year olds).

As well as the classic jigsaw pieces this toy also comes with eight different coloured wooden planets that slot into place once the puzzle is completed, and an LED sun that sits and glows in the centre. Our tester loved the added adornments and as a space fan, this instantly caught their imagination and created a lot of discussion about our solar system and the various planets in it (cue lots of frantic googling).

LEGO

Disney and LEGO is a five year old match made in heaven. We absolutely loved the beautiful quality of this toy set, with lovely iconic Disney details and easy-to-follow instructions. Our princess-obsessed tester instantly fell in love with the character pieces, their cute sidekicks and there’s a lot of open-ended play potential here.

However, what we really liked about it was how, unlike many of the larger sets, this dinky toy could be easily folded up, clicked together and either taken out on little childhood adventures or stored away neatly on the bookshelf. This would make a perfect birthday gift for a five year old niece or nephew and is a great set for introducing those essential building and problem solving skills.

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