Speaking Part 2 · ObjectsIn the May–Aug 2026 forecast
Describe a Toy You Had in Childhood
In short
“Describe a Toy You Had in Childhood” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Toy You Had in Childhood. You should say:
- •What the toy was
- •Who gave it to you
- •How you played with it
- •And explain why it was important to you
Band 9 model answer
The toy I want to talk about is a big, battered box of second-hand building blocks — the interlocking plastic kind — that I was given when I was about six. It wasn't even a proper set. My uncle worked abroad, and he bought the whole box at a flea market from a family whose kids had outgrown it, so it was actually three or four incomplete sets jumbled together, with no instructions for any of them.
Looking back, that missing instruction booklet was the best thing about it. Because there was no picture on a box telling me what those bricks were supposed to become, everything I built had to come out of my own head. I made lopsided houses, spaceships with one wing longer than the other, a fire station for a fire engine I didn't own. Nothing ever looked like the gleaming models in shop windows, and it never occurred to me to care.
I played with that box almost daily for years, usually sprawled on the floor of the room I shared with my brother. Some of my clearest childhood memories are the small rituals around it: tipping the whole box out with that tremendous clatter, hunting for one specific tiny piece for twenty minutes, and the family joke that nothing on earth hurts like stepping on a brick barefoot at night. My brother and I ran a sort of permanent construction rivalry — his towers were always taller, mine, I maintained, were structurally superior.
The reason it mattered so much, I think, only became clear to me as an adult. We weren't well off at the time, and that second-hand box was easily the biggest present I'd ever received — I remember the day it arrived more vividly than most of my birthdays. But beyond the sentimental side, I genuinely believe those bricks shaped how my mind works. They taught me that you fail, you take it apart, you rebuild it better — nobody ever had to explain the idea of a prototype to me later in life, because I'd been making them since I was six.
The box itself survived, incidentally. My mother, who throws nothing away, kept it, and a couple of years ago it was handed over to my little nephew. Watching him tip it out with that exact same clatter was ridiculously moving — the same bricks, thirty years on, doing the same job on a third child.
So it was never really about the toy. It was a box of patience, imagination and sibling politics, disguised as plastic. I've owned far more expensive things since; none of them taught me half as much.
Make it your own: three angles
A construction toy that shaped how you think
Lets you connect childhood play to your adult mind — creativity, patience, problem-solving — which turns nostalgia into band-9 reflection.
A soft toy that was your childhood companion
Strong emotional territory — comfort, bedtime rituals, where it is now — but keep one concrete story so it doesn't dissolve into pure sentiment.
A toy connected to a person who gave it
If the giver matters more than the object — a grandparent, an absent parent — make the toy a symbol of that relationship and let the story follow.
What the examiner is listening for
A pure past-tense card — the examiner is checking whether you can sustain narrative tenses (used to, would + verb, past continuous) for two minutes without drifting into the present. The strongest answers connect the toy to who you became; the model's line from building blocks to prototypes is exactly the kind of reflective leap that signals band 8–9.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- What games did you play as a child?
- Did you prefer playing indoors or outdoors when you were young?
- Do children today play differently from when you were a child?
- Have you kept anything from your childhood?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
How are the toys children play with today different from those in the past?
The obvious shift is from physical to digital — screens have absorbed an enormous share of playtime, and even physical toys now light up, talk, or connect to apps. Toys are also far more branded than before; children ask for characters, not categories. What's been lost, I'd argue, is open-endedness — a stick could be anything, whereas a licensed talking robot can only be itself.
Do you think expensive toys are better for children?
Almost the opposite, past a basic quality threshold. The research and every parent's experience agree that children often play longer with the cardboard box than the gift inside it, because the box demands imagination. Expensive toys tend to do the playing for the child — all lights and scripts. Price buys parental pride more often than it buys developmental value.
What can children learn through playing with toys?
A remarkable amount, which is why educators call play a child's real work. Building toys teach spatial reasoning and the habit of failing and retrying; dolls and figures are rehearsals for empathy and social situations; shared toys force negotiation and turn-taking. The learning works precisely because it's invisible — no child stacking blocks thinks they're studying physics, but they are.
Should parents limit the number of toys a child has?
I think so, within reason. Studies — and tidy-up time in any household — suggest children with fewer toys play more deeply and creatively with each one, while a mountain of options produces constant switching and quick boredom. Rotating toys is a clever middle path. The harder truth is that overbuying is usually about the parents — guilt, love, or advertising — rather than the child's needs.
Why do some adults keep their childhood toys?
Because the toy is a physical anchor to a self that otherwise only exists in fading memory — holding it collapses thirty years in a second, which photos rarely manage. There's also continuity: passing a toy to your own children says something about family that a new purchase can't. And for a few, of course, it's investment — mint-condition old toys sell for absurd sums.
Is it a problem that children now prefer video games to traditional toys?
It's a change with real trade-offs rather than a simple decline. Good games teach strategy, persistence and even teamwork, and dismissing them wholesale is generational reflex. What genuinely worries me is what disappears at the margins: physical manipulation, boredom that sparks invention, and face-to-face negotiation over shared toys. The dose and the balance are the problem, not the games themselves.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| battered | old and damaged through heavy use |
| second-hand | previously owned by someone else |
| to outgrow something | to become too old for something you once enjoyed |
| open-ended | having no fixed use or answer, allowing many possibilities |
| to spark imagination | to make someone start imagining and inventing |
| sibling rivalry | competition between brothers and sisters |
| a hand-me-down | something passed from an older child to a younger one |
| nostalgia | warm, slightly sad feelings about the past |
| to hold sentimental value | to be precious because of memories, not money |
| well off | having plenty of money |
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