How Wooden Toys Help Children's Development
If you walk into a toy shop, you will find yourself in the middle of a wide variety of colorful toys and games. Even though some might look very nice and attractive, unfortunately, most of them feature intricately-designed plastic pieces.
Since babies love to explore and try everything by putting them in their mouths, it is crucial that any toy coming into contact with your child is safe and harmless for them. If taking into consideration the fact that almost every single plastic toy contains chemicals and harmful substances such as BPA’s and phthalates, letting your child play with them is not exactly the best idea. So, when you’re buying a very colorful plastic toy for your kid, you’re automatically letting him play in an unhealthy environment.
Unlike plastic, wood is a natural and ecologically responsible material. Therefore, wooden toys not only help save the environment but also care about the health of your little one. Even if a wooden toy happens to break (which is less often than plastic ones), it is not going to leave behind a sharp and jagged edge like plastic toys do. With wooden toys, you can peacefully enjoy some spare time knowing that your child is playing with safe toys that cannot harm them in any way.
Let’s be honest here, wooden toys are much more nicely designed than plastic toys. Even the simple fact that a wooden toy can be passed on from generation to generation makes it very special. Wouldn’t it be awesome having a toy that your grandmother used to play with when she was little and being able to pass it on to your grandchildren?
Even though wooden toys are as healthy as they are timeless, they also offer more opportunities to your little one. Let’s dive into some ways wooden toys can help your children’s development.
Encourage Children’s Imagination
While there are a lot of wooden toys that come in specific forms, like vehicles, houses, animal shapes, or castles, many come in the simplest forms such as wooden building blocks, sticks, or boards. Despite this, wooden simple toys offer more possibilities for your kids than you can imagine. For instance, simple building blocks can actively fuel kids’ creativity and imagination by letting them invent various ways to play with them. The charm of wooden toys is that kids can come up with their own rules, change the toys’ purpose, or re-purposed as the game progresses, without the need to stop play to find another toy or object.
Support a Child’s Cognitive Growth
By grabbing and lifting, balancing and stacking, merging and categorizing wooden blocks and toys children learn to make logical conclusions and learn the basic rules of physics (weights, volumes, geometry, etc.). When exploring the world through the sense of touch they become adept at recognizing the key elements and attributes of the world: hot or cold, sticky or rough, wet or dry, soft or rigid.
Develop Children’s Creativity
Unlike plastic toys that have batteries and the capacity to light up, sing songs, or emit different animal sounds, wooden toys are an amazing way to develop children’s creativity. Because there are no exact sounds, children playing with a wooden toy are in absolute controlof the game, thus, they can come with natural voice effects and sounds from their imagination.
This ability to create something new and interesting makes a wooden toy perfect for stimulating children’s imagination and promoting creativity. Thus, by naturally recreating different sounds, your child will be more inventing and creative.
Help Build Motor Skills
As children learn how to manipulate the toys, they strengthen the muscles in their hands, which improves their fine motor skills. Little hands can practice their reading and writing skills with this Wooden Alphabet Tracing Board while older children may enjoy improving their recognition ability and sensory activity with this Montessori Screw Driver Board. Designed to turn the boring learning process into a creative and fun one, our Panda Brothers Wooden Montessori Toys are the best educational gift for kids and toddlers.
Encourage Imaginatively Play
Exploring and playing with toys made from organic materials allows children to slow down and probe into the qualities and possibilities of play. Plastic, clangy and bright toys can overstimulate, stress, and cause exhaustion in the child, compared to the minimalistic, wholesome and non-intrusive nature of wooden toys. The result is a child quietly and deeply engulfed in quality imaginative play.
Support Hand-Eye Coordination Development
The fact that wooden toys might sometimes be larger or heavier than plastic ones is not always a bad thing. In contrast, the extra weight and more awkward shapes help your children’s development as they seek to build and balance wooden blocks in ways that they consider interesting.
Wood can also heat up and attain warmth, as well as has a mild natural smell. This is especially beneficial for younger children, who discover and explore the world not only through touch and sight but also through smell and putting things in their mouths, so wooden toys can become a truly organic extension of play, gratify the young curious mind and satisfy their senses.
Last but not least, wooden toys are just amazingly beautiful! The colors and traditional natural wooden design make the toys so aesthetically pleasing and lovely to play with.
