Playworks sells toys that invite play and enhance development in children from birth through age five

Special Needs Toys are separated into seven sub-categories to facilitate finding toys that address specific special needs and situations. All Special Needs Toys enhance child development, allowing children with diverse abilities to experience a variety of sensory feedback and stimulation. Distraction Toys also provide relief from stress and enhance a child's ability to cope.

Distraction Toys

Distraction Toys enable children to turn their attention away from stressful situations and immerse themselves in play. These toys invite children of all ages to escape and explore, enabling them to cope.

Meteor Storm is our most popular distraction toy. To activate a countinuously changing light display, a child must press and hold down the button. Letting go turns off the light. The child must focus on the act of play itself.

Now available in two sizes. The larger globe of the original prevents young children from sticking the light in their mouths while the mini, with its breakaway cord, can be worn around the neck for instant gratification.

Light Up Toys

Light Up Toys provide visual feedback and stimulation to both low vision and sighted children. Although lighting up is the primary function of these toys, all provide multi-sensory experiences.

Meteor Storm, with its press and hold switch, engages the sense of touch and invites children to experiment with on/off and to track the continuously changing color patterns of the spinning globe. This spinning causes the globe to vibrate, stimulating "feel" when the child places his hand on the globe, enabling blind children to enjoy Meteor Storm too.

Sound Toys

Sound Toys offer auditory feedback, enhance language and motor skills, develop spatial intelligence and understanding of cause and effect.

Marble Ring is one of the Sound Toys that provides varied visual, tactile, and auditory experiences. Manipulalting the Marble Ring, the child experiences the feel of heavy gauge metal wire, and the feel, sight and sound of 12 marbles rolling through the wire. Leaving the Marble Ring in the wooden box and tilting it from side to side and back and forth produces entirely different sounds.

Sound & Light Toys

Sound & Light Toys offer both auditory and visual feedback. Although producing sound and light is the primary function of these toys, each requires the child to perform a task to elicit these responses, re-enforcing understanding of cause and effect and refining motor skills.

The multi-purpose Switching Gears features 13 interchangeable gears, each printed with a different facial expression. Children learn to identify these expressions, building language skills. Experimenting with the placement of individual wheels, children learn cause and effect and the basic function of gears. Connecting the wheels and pushing the "on" button sets the gears spinning in a chain reaction. Lights blink and melodies play.

Texture Toys

Texture Toys provide oppportunities to use touch to explore similarities and differences and to learn words to describe these characterisitics. Developing tactile discrimination skills enriches sighted children and lays the foundation for blind children to learn braille.

Intricately sculpted puzzles show where different animals live in forest, farm, and ocean habitats. Different textures bring habitats to life, from rough bark of woodpecker's tree to hermit crab's bumpy shell. Each animal fits only in its own home for learning by association. Measures 16 3/4" x 11 3/4". Speech and language therapists value Textured Habitat Puzzles for their wealth of language and cognitive skill building opportunities, from identifying the animals and their habitats to exploring such concepts as over/under, outside/inside, and above/below/beside.

Oral-Motor Toys

Oral-Motor Toys aid in developing oral motor skills necessary for eating and speech. Tooting, humming, whistling, and blowing toys exercise facial and oral muscles and encourage deep breathing and controlled blowing.

Facial and oral massagers provide oral stimulation. Their low-intensity vibration calms and organizes sensory input. Jigglers, the only continuously "on" chewable oral facial massagers, turn on and off with a twist and come in two playful styles: a purple elephant and a green alligator.

Multi-Purpose Toys

The versatility of Multi-Purpose Toys facilitates motor, language, and cognitive development.

Bilibo is one such toy. Its unique shape and bright colors arouse curiosity and encourage experimentation. Children sit in and on, rock and spin, stand on top of, and hop and jump from one to another. One Bilibo can cradle a doll; a row of them can become a train or anything else a creative mind can imagine.