What are Some Good Educational Toys?

Everyone wants their children to excel at problem solving, creativity, sharing, and reading. Educational toys are a great opportunity to combine play, social interaction, practice, and new knowledge. You might picture flashcards full of useless factoids as boring examples, but good educational toys really are fun, entertaining, and adapt to your child's age and interest.
Toys that reinforce the connections children already make between colors, shapes, words, and pictures will strengthen their understanding of building, reading, following directions, specializing in tasks, and motor coordination. The toys that you remember spending hours with as a child are your best bet, including puzzles, building blocks, clay, interlocking logs or other plastic pieces, coloring books, and puppets. You're striving for toys that appeal to different age groups and don't strictly work in one way, not necessarily ways to make him or her learn rote knowledge.

dont forget "role play" toys as well. Things like dolls and action men, farm and zoo toys etc. They all build creativity by encouraging children to make up stories as they play. I spent hours and hours playing with my farm and horse toys as a kid, making up names and characters for the animals and people, building and rebuilding my "farm". I'm a writer now

I like the puzzle pieces that has shapes in it.