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This is an interesting page with some nice links and videos. I love the look of these wooden toys, I think it's a shame that they aren't as popular as they used to be- Marie C

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See my presentation on wooden toys https://prezi.com/p/bgk1u6kxuh4r/

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Every year, companies develop new toys and games for education. Most of them feature intricately-designed plastic pieces. Some come with all the bells and whistles. Many have been designed for a few specific purposes.

While these toys may play a role in your child's education, you can end up spending a lot of money, but not receiving a lot of educational value. Wooden toys, however, often have a lot more to offer children than the latest trendy educational toys. Here are 15 Benefits of Wooden Educational Toys for Home Education.

1. Wooden Toys are Timeless

Of course, wooden toys are trendy in their own right. In fact, they have been trendy for decades, if not centuries. Your grandparents and great-grandparents were learning with wooden toys when they were young and your grandchildren and great-grandchildren can also learn with wooden toys. While there are a lot of cool, new educational products out there, sometimes there's value in sticking with the tried and true. Even if companies reimagine the organization, color, or design of their wooden toys, they still have the same classic feel and offer the same educational benefits that children have been reaping for generations.

2. Wooden Toys are Durable

Let's face it - children are rough on their toys and other educational materials. You likely have missing game pieces and at least one broken toy laying around your home. Not only can wooden toys be enjoyed by generations, but the same wooden toys often last throughout generations. Since they're made of quality wood and are solid, it's hard for them to be damaged beyond the basic scratch or dent. If your child gets them dirty, you can easily clean them so they're ready for the next learning activity. If you're going to invest in learning products for your home, you want to be sure they will last a long time and that they can be used with multiple children.

3. Wooden Toys Grow with Your Child

When you invest in wooden toys for home education, you invest in something that is durable and versatile enough to grow with your child. Toddlers and preschoolers may engage in simple imaginative play and basic manipulation with wooden toys, but older children can begin to incorporate wooden toys in more complex imaginative scenarios, work them into discussions of geometry and physics, and use them to solve problems. As your child's skills and mental abilities grow, the uses for wooden toys also grow. While many products for home education come with suggested age ranges on the front, the ways wooden toys can be used are so versatile that they can connect with a broad range of ages and ability levels.

4. Wooden Toys Encourage Imagination

Wooden toys give children the ability to take control. While some wooden toys come in the shape of vehicles, food, or common household items, they still encourage children to use their imaginations to incorporate them into learning and play. Other wooden educational toys come in basic shapes, such as sticks, blocks, arcs, triangles, and circles. These basic shapes allow children to really explore their uses and come up with creative ways to use them in different subject areas. For example, children can experiment with physics by building different structures with the wooden toys or learn about geometry by manipulating the toys to create their own geometric patterns.

While learning resources can provide you with ideas for using wooden toys to educate your child at home, they're just a starting point, a way to pique your child's interest before letting them come up with even more creative uses. Younger children in particular can fit virtually any object into any scenario. Since most wooden toys don't come with a pre-conceived purpose, they encourage children to stretch their imaginations even further.

5. Wooden Toys Incorporate Real-Life Skills

As children engage in imaginative play, much of it will trend toward real-life scenarios. For example, children may have wooden toys in the shape of food and common household items to use as they play a game of house or grocery store. Even if children just have basic shapes, they may begin to use wooden toys and their imaginations to build real-life skills. For example, wooden sticks may come to represent currency as they buy and sell other wooden objects. Red circles may become strawberries and blue circles may become blueberries as they make a wooden fruit salad.

6. Wooden Toys are Less Distracting

When children play with wooden toys, they supply all the voices, alarms, and other sound effects, rather than listening to the toy. This allows children to be in control of what they do with the toys and to keep their minds clear as they think through different scenarios or solve problems. While some children really enjoy toys with all the bells and whistles, the noises and electronic features can interrupt a child's thinking process or limit how far a child's imagination can go by boxing them into specific ways to play with the toy.

7. Wooden Toys Encourage Interaction

When children use their imaginations and practice real-life scenarios, they often like to bring others in on their play. Toys that have voices or other sound effects often encourage solo play since children get the interaction and responses they crave from the toy itself.

Since wooden toys don't come with sounds, lights, or other interactive features, children must find others to interact with them. If you have multiple children at home, wooden toys become something more than one child can play with at once. If you only have one child or prefer to focus on education in a one-on-one setting, your can provide that interaction with your child. By interacting with your child as they play with wooden toys you can help build their understanding and provide positive reinforcement as they make decisions.

8. Wooden Toys Develop Reasoning Skills

Since wooden toys don't have voices or electronic parts to tell them what piece to pick up or what step to take next and they aren't designed to fit a specific activity, children develop their reasoning skills as they learn with wooden toys. For example, children may want to make a model to help answer a science question or figure out how to make a shape using tangram-style wooden shapes. As children manipulate the different shapes and sizes of wooden toys, they're building their reasoning skills. They also build reasoning skills as they organize their wooden toys into different categories. For example, they may opt to organize them by size, by shape, or even by color.

9. Wooden Toys Support Problem-Solving

Wooden toys also have the ability to support problem-solving. On a more basic level, children can use wooden toys to help provide visual representations of addition and subtraction problems. They can also be used to create logic puzzles for children to solve, to build towers that will withstand different forces acting upon them, or to create models to help represent different advanced math and science problems. Because wooden toys come in more general shapes and sizes, children will have to problem-solve to figure out how to make them fit certain scenarios rather than having the pre-made pieces that often come with other educational sets.

10. Wooden Toys Improve Hand-Eye Coordination

Because of their more basic shapes, wooden toys also help children build hand-eye coordination. Activities such as building towers out of wooden blocks, carefully placing the pieces so the towers don't topple over, or threading a string through a series of wooden beads, require children to pay attention to distance and placement. Children can also use wooden toys to begin to represent concepts such as over, under, beside, up, and down. When they solve puzzles or create patterns using wooden toys they also begin to visually see how items fit together, which also improves their hand-eye coordination.

11. Wooden Toys Build Fine Motor Skills

As children manipulate wooden toys, they also build their fine motor skills. Wooden toys come in different shapes and sizes. Rather than being molded to fit a small child's hand, they can sometimes be a bit clunky and awkward for children to handle. While clunky and awkward may not seem like an ideal trait in a toy, the design of wooden toys requires children to work on different ways of grasping and manipulating the toys to get them to do what they need them to do. Babies and toddlers can work on basic grasping skills with larger wooden blocks and toys, while preschoolers and older kids can use wooden shapes, beads, and sticks to focus on a finer grasp, twisting the wrist, and other key motor skills.

12. Wooden Toys are Tactile

Unlike toys made of lightweight plastic, many wooden toys have a bit of weight to them, so when children interact with the toys they are more aware of what they are doing. This weight can be particularly beneficial for children with delays in the development of their fine motor skills or those with sensory disorders because heavier toys will help them feel their movements as they work to develop their skills. The tactile element of wooden toys also mean children have to think more and exert more energy as they play and learn. For example, the wheels on a wooden toy car may not move as smoothly as on a plastic or metal car, requiring children to apply more force to make it move.

13. Wooden Toys are Safe

As children manipulate the wooden toys, you don't have to worry much about their safety because wooden toys are designed to be safe. Most wooden toys won't break easily, which means children won't be exposed to sharp edges or small pieces that have broken off of the toy. They're also generally non-toxic and made from natural materials, which means children can manipulate them by chewing on them or sucking on them. You don't have to worry about polluting your home with unknown chemicals or worry about what your child could possibly be eating.

14. Wooden Toys are Quiet

Not only will wooden toys not pollute your home with chemicals, they won't pollute your home with a lot of noise. While this lack of noise keeps kids from being distracted, it also provides parents with the quiet they so often need during the day. Children cannot accidentally leave a wooden toy running or have to listen to incessant beeps and boops as they play. Instead, you can focus on the sound of your children's voices and laughter as they learn and interact with their wooden toys. When your children go to sleep, the toys are asleep and quiet too.

15. Wooden Toys are Beautiful

Whether you have a dedicated space for education at home or you simply include educational toys with your child's other toys, you want the area to look nice. Wooden toys come with their own aesthetic appeal. Those with bright colors can add a bit of positive energy to the learning process, even if they're just sitting on a shelf. Those in a plain wood color can help make the room look nice without distracting children from whatever they are working on. If the toys are just sitting out in your general living space, they have the ability to blend in with your regular décor. This allows you to leave them out and let children interact with them whenever the urge strikes, rather than hiding them away when guests visit.

Wooden toys may cost more than a lot of the latest educational toys, but they come with an incredible value. Rather than coming with a set purpose and a limited use, wooden toys have the potential to last for years. As children grow, they will find different ways to use wooden toys to help build their imaginations, solve problems, and develop fine motor and reasoning skills. While they may not be the toys children see on television or at their friends' homes, wooden toys are the timeless toys that allow children to learn and grow every time they pull them out to play and their beauty and safety means that they can be left out for children to interact with, rather than keeping them stored away.

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15 Benefits of Wooden Educational Toys for Home Education

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Every year, companies develop new toys and games for education. Most of them feature intricately-designed plastic pieces. Some come with all the bells and whistles. Many have been designed for a few specific purposes. While these toys may play a role in your child's education, you can end up spending a lot of money, but not receiving a lot of educational value.

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Top 20 Types of Wooden Toys for Toddlers - best, most, greatest of everything ranked User Contributed Rankings - ShareRanks.com

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Here is a list of the top styles of wooden toys enjoyed by toddlers. Not listed are the manufacturers, as there can be several for each toy.

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The wooden biscuit box is really cute!- Marie C

I thought so too :) Kim S

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Who doesn't love a traditional wooden toy? Not only do wooden toys look gorgeous compared to the lurid bits of play gear that clutter up our homes once kids come along, but they're sturdier and more environmentally-friendly than plastic toys.

Yes, wooden toys tend can be expensive. But, as the famous saying goes, you gets what you pays for. A wooden toy, handled well, can be passed down for generations, adding to its charm and value. The same cannot be said for the cheap, popular toys that end up topping the average Christmas wish list, so factor in 'price per play' rather than just the cost.

Don't settle for any old wooden toy though - choose ones made from sustainable materials and free from chemicals. And, as many wooden toys have to be assembled, make sure you know where the screwdriver is. Little ones might be underwhelmed to discover that they'll have to wait before they can actually start playing with their new wooden toy.

The best thing about wooden toys, apart from their character and eco-credentials, is the fact that they never run out of batteries. With no flashy gadgetry or noisy features, wooden toys encourage children to use their imagination during play. So get down on the floor alongside your child and enjoy some classic, plastic-free play together. You'll be glad you did.

Play Barbecue: £32, JoJo Maman Bébé

This gorgeous wooden barbecue play set was a runaway hit with our five-year-old tester, who instantly started grilling us some play grub. The cuttable wooden food items are beautifully designed and the whole thing kickstarted imaginative play at a new level. We love how all the food and utensils fit neatly inside the barbecue for easy storage, too. Not that we can ever see this being put away.

Star Beans Coffee Shop: £68, Great little Trading Company

You don't need lots of space for this stylish wooden cafe set - it fits well on any table top. The attention to detail is fantastic - the coffee machine has moving parts, and it comes with coffee cups, spoons, sandwiches and cakes all included. It's compatible with the Devon Market Stall, which we'll be having a word with Santa about, and you buy a wooden till separately.

BRIO Smart Tech Engine Set With Action Tunnels: £89.95

Wow, wooden train sets have moved on since we were kids. This snazzy Smart Tech engine can start and stop, change direction and speed, honk its horn and even flash its lights. You control what it does and when by choosing where to place the Action Tunnels, which tell it what to do. Our tester is keen to add more track to this already but we love the idea of building up our collection between Christmas and birthdays presents over the years.

Chad Valley Mud Kitchen: £100, Argos

The merits of messy play are well documented and this outdoor mud pie kitchen is a fabulous way to facilitate hours of it - without having to clean up afterwards. It's quick and easy to assemble and features a hob, two play sinks, an oven and utensils. We love the chalk board menu, and the fact that this looks so good in the garden - even when covered in mud, leaves and water.

Kids Concept Toolbox in Pink: £24.95, Scandiborn​

Oh, how we love this pale pink wooden toolbox. Aside from smashing through the usual gender stereotypes when it comes to toys aimed at boys or girls, this set really works. Our tester learned to use a screwdriver, spanner and angle hook, how to attach and remove screws and nuts, and why hitting your brother with a wooden hammer is a bad idea.

Pirate Ship Scene Craft It Kit: £12.95, Cotton Twist

There's more to wooden toys than pricey play sets. This crafty creative kit includes wooden ship cut outs which you can paint and decorate with the supplies included, and then assemble to form a 3D structure, complete with sail and mast. It comes with two adorable pirate peg dolls. This kept our five-year-old tester well entertained on a rainy afternoon, and the finished item looks lovely on display in her bedroom. You can personalise the box, so it makes the perfect plastic-free pressie for an arty type.

Grimm's Rainbow: £22.96, Babipur

This wooden rainbow is strangely simple yet irresistibly tactile - no-one can avoid picking it up whenever they walk past it. It's been used in play as everything from tunnels for trains to bowls in our toy cafe. Dad's the biggest fan though - he seems to have appropriated this as a chic bit of office decor. It's cut from a single piece of lime wood and has been naturally stained using non-toxic, water-based colour.

Tidlo Fire Engine Set: £49, Mulberry Bush

This wooden fire engine is a thing of beauty. Don't be put off by the price - it's a good size and so well made that it's good value in the long term. A real heirloom toy. There's so much detail to encourage social and imaginative play, including an extendable ladder, side hatches and a moving steering wheel. A set of four wooden fire fighters are sold separately (£25), but they're well worth adding to your basket.

Melissa & Doug Let's Play House! Cleaning Set: £30, thetoyshop.com

For that stage where kids want to copy everything they see you doing, this six-piece set of cleaning tools is a lovely wooden toy. We love that it's easy to store neatly - everything hangs tidily on the stand, and the dustpan snaps into place. Play your cards right, and you might get away with turning playtime into chore-time without the kids even realising.

Petit Collage Modern Elephant Wood Xylophone: £20, Beyond the Stork

Introduce budding musicians to harmony and rhythm with this cute musical instrument. The elephant trunk doubles as a handle - our little testers loved carrying this around like a suitcase - and there's a handy elastic hoop for the wooden mallet so you don't need to worry about it getting lost. Best of all, this makes a cheerful tinkly sound that won't give you a headache.

Personalised Twist and Turn Puzzle, £18.99, All By Mama

We love this educational wooden toy. It's a real twist (pun intended) on conventional shape sorter toys, as you have to twist and turn the shapes to slide them down the three pegs until they reach the base. Although it's technically a baby toy, kids as old as five kept coming back to this and couldn't resist putting their dexterity to the test. You can add your own message to the base for a lovely personal touch so it's another ideal gift.

Le Toy Van Blender Set 'Fruit & Smooth': £40, Kidly

Wooden toys don't get more beautiful than this. Everything about this toy blender and smoothie set is enticing. Our little tester loved taking our orders (hold the kiwi), 'cutting' the wooden fruit in half with the toy knife supplied, popping it all in the blender and then serving us delicious fruit smoothies. Literally hours of fun, plus it looks beautiful - even when it's scattered all over the living room floor.

The Verdict: Best wooden toys

Tough call. We loved every item on this list but the play barbecue from Jojo Maman Bebe wins because nothing else lit up our tester's face quite like this. She hasn't stopped playing with it since it arrived.

The item which most wowed the parents was the Star Beans Coffee Shop because it looks so stylish yet takes up minimal play space. And perhaps because it's about as close as some of us can get to enjoying a quiet cappuccino at a chic little cafe any time soon.
IndyBest product reviews are unbiased, independent advice you can trust. On some occasions, we earn revenue if you click the links and buy the products, but we never allow this to bias our coverage. The reviews are compiled through a mix of expert opinion and real-world testing.

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Who doesn't love a traditional wooden toy? Not only do wooden toys look gorgeous compared to the lurid bits of play gear that clutter up our homes once kids come along, but they're sturdier and more environmentally-friendly than plastic toys.

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Hand Made Wooden Toys by Pap's Wooden Toys

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Wooden toys have a long rich history across the globe. Making wooden toys can be enjoyable for seasoned woodworkers and beginners looking for a rewarding hobby.

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Wooden toys have been an important part of childhood since early civilization and while children today are much different than those thousands of years ago, many of their favorite toys are similar to those that have been around for centuries. As long ago as the ancient Greek and Roman empires, children are known to have played with dolls, horses, and chariots. The earliest toys discovered by archaeologists were all made of wood.