Many parents instinctively know that they can do a few things to encourage and stimulate their baby's development. But many lack exact details.

Babies learn important skills mainly by going through specific development experiences. Unfortunately, there isn't only one experience to teach them everything.

From time to time it happens that a baby doesn't learn and master all the skills. That's when development or learning problems occur.

Baby stimulation programs try to avoid this problem by taking your baby through the complete range of development experiences.

But what most parents don't know is... they do not need expensive things to get great results. In fact, they can easily do the same at home.

All they need to do is to use the right TOOLS to encourage their child.

TOOLS is an acronym for the 5 areas to specifically encourage in your baby's development.

Let's look at these 5 areas separately:

T - Tiny? or fine movement development.

Give your baby things to develop hand and finger skills. Encourage your baby to reach out and take big objects, use index fingers to point to objects, put objects in containers and take them out again, roll and throw objects, hold crayons, scribble spontaneously, build blocks on top of each other, put lids on bowls, preferring one hand as a dominant one, play with syrup and feathers and, draw horizontal and vertical lines.

O - Overall? that's total or also called gross motor development.

Give your child playthings or play games to encourage overall body movement? like rolling, sitting, crawling, kneeling, standing, walking, climbing, jumping and running.

When buying toys, chose playthings such as a roller, wheelbarrow, wagon... or any other solid push-pull toy. Also, balls are typical evergreen toys never to be overlooked - even for young ones.

O - Observe? that's visual encouragement.

One key area baby stimulation activities must develop is the abilities to see, focus and follow specific moving objects, distinguish faces, look for objects like toys which are dropped and focus on nearby objects or ones further away.

Also? encourage your child to place squares and circles in a form board. Puzzles are great aids here. It's also great exercise to encourage recognizing detail and faces in pictures and photographs.

L - Listen? hearing or also called auditory stimulation.

Encourage using words, vowels like "a" and "o", nouns like "m" and "p", sounds like "ka" and "ma", reacting on mother's voice, reacting on simple instructions, using one word sentences, recognizing own name, understanding "no", simple questions and verbs like "drinking"? "eating", and, starting to recognize common objects.

This simply means? communicate with your baby.

S - Sense? feel? smell... also known as sensory stimulation.

Give your baby chance to learn and experience common smells and textures. Any smell such as fruit, food, soap, perfume and textures such as sand, water, leaves and even clothing materials are wonderful stimuli.

Babies learn a lot by feeling and sensing things... that's one of the reasons why they stick everything in their mouth.

These 5 key areas are definite parts of overall baby development. Together they form a vital range of skills every baby must develop sooner or later.

Thus, whether you play, buy educational toys or undertake any other activity with your child, make sure you include every part of this TOOLS checklist system.

It's a simple, proven way to ensure your baby gets all the right things now.