2025 VIPS Holiday Gift Guide
We asked our teachers and interventionists to recommend a few toys suitable for children who are blind or have low vision.
Feel free to reach out to your VIPS teacher or interventionist if you need ideas for creating accessible experiences from a favorite book, creating a story box for your child, or finding more ideas for what to buy for your child.
Happy Holidays from all of us at VIPS!
From Mr. David
Baby Einstein Sea Dreams Soother Musical Crib Toy and Sound Machine
This product not only helps calm fussy children and prepare them for rest, but also comes with a remote and an orange star-shaped button that matches the one on the aquarium. It’s perfect for cause-and-effect play opportunities, and children can work on shifting their gaze from one orange star to the other.
From Ms. Michelle
Bathtub Light Up Toys
These toys light up when they touch the water. It helps to engage children in the bathtub. It encourages them to reach for things around them. They can hide them under bubbles and play hide-and-seek. If you take them out of the tub when they are finished and dry them off, they last for quite a long time.
VTech Turn and Learn Driver
This toy has many different ways to activate it and many movements to encourage the child to engage with it. They can press buttons, move a lever, turn the switch, and turn the wheel. It also has fun sounds that help with cause and effects. It does light up.
Where’s the Giraffe?
This is a lift-the-flap book. There is something hiding behind a felt flap on each plate. The child has to explore to figure out which way the flap can be lifted. There is also a mirror at the back of these books to help the child engage, and they get excited when they see themselves in the book
Pound A Ball Toy
This toy helps children work on hand-eye coordination by having them pound on a ball to make it fall. They can also work on tracking skills as they watch the ball roll down the track.
From Ms. Tamara
Hippo Pop Musical Toy Keyboard
This play piano includes five musical modes and 26 sound effects. The Hippo Pop keyboard plays 15 fun songs and six nursery rhymes. Pressing the tiny hands-friendly piano keys makes eight colorful birds light up and pop.
From Ms. Abby
Bluey Hide and Seek Game
This is a Hide and Seek Bluey, you can hide it and then it has a timer. It will giggle and give you a clue to find her. I figured it would be good to work on sound locating, it is also fairly big, so that would likely help with visually locating it as well. I am sure you could put another color, like red tape, on her belly to help it stand out as well. plan to either get the Bluey myself or wait till my niece and nephew outgrow theirs and borrow it.
Baby’s Very First Slide & See Farm
I also like the Usborne finger trail books and the slide-and-see books. The pages are a bit busy, but you can trace different trails with them, which would also work for location concepts.
From Ms. Staci
Sensory play time can be a great opportunity to develop skills, whether visual attention, fine motor strengthening, matching, scanning, or more, through play. The toys I’m recommending this year would be especially effective when used in a water table, the bathtub, or with a lightbox (or even better, with a tub of water on a lightbox).
Peekaboo Fishbowl Friends
The Peekaboo Fishbowl Friends can help practice counting, color matching, and stacking, and the transparent fishbowls would work well on a lightbox.
Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set
The Helping Hands Fine Motor Tool Set and the Squeeze Rain Bulbs (below) are good play tools for working on fine motor strength and coordination as well as visual-motor skills. Whereas the Helping Hands set offers a variety of tools to work on pinching, a scissor motion, and squeezing, the rain bulbs have a different texture on each bulb in the set.
Squeeze Rain Bulbs
Glo-Pals Water Activated Light-Up Cubes
The Glo-Pals Water Activated Light-Up Cubes are a fun addition to water play for any child but might especially grab the attention of children with CVI or low vision.
Light Up Whale Bath Toy Sprinkler
My nephew is a big fan of the Light Up Whale Bath Toy Sprinkler, which changes colors and squirts water as it floats in water, making it another great toy for visual attention, tracking (though it is slow moving), and fun.
From Ms. Paige
Excellerations Translucent Rainbow Octagon Stackers
This toy is great on the light box for learners who have light perception! The pieces are great for little hands. Their hollow shape makes them easy to grasp, and their simplicity helps with learning the skill of together and apart.
Light Up Crab Bubble Machine Blower with LED Lights
This adorable crab bubble machine creates a waterfall of bubbles, while colorful LED lights illuminate the bubbles to captivate your child’s visual attention. It mounts to the wall of your bathtub, making it easy to present in their best visual field. The bubbles emit as a foamy vertical column, making them fun and easy to touch!
PlayTab – Modular, Sensory Activity Board for Babies and Toddlers
It is a modular activity board! It is customizable to the child’s fine motor and cognitive developmental needs, and the arrangement of it would be great for teaching orientation skills – where things are in space in relation to one another!
