There's something so inviting and comforting about wooden toys.
The silky and pleasing touch of the strong wood in your hands...
Its simplistic nature as opposed to the overly complicated plastic or digital toys...
Offering a calm aesthetic to enhance your living space that somehow never goes out of style...
There is so much wooden toys can offer. Let's explore the top advantages of choosing wooden toys for your children.
1. Educational
Wooden toys offer a range of authentic learning opportunities for children. Wooden toys such as figurines, puzzles, blocks, academic boards help children with their literacy, numeracy, problem solving and motor skills.
In Small World Play, children use miniature items such as animals and vehicles and act out scenarios. This helps them develop their language through use of vocabulary and also social skills (covered in advantage #3).
2. Develops Creativity & Imagination
In this digital age, children can be surrounded with many electronic gadgets and colourful toys that are overly complicated in use; pressing buttons that produce chimes, beeps and whistles and instructing children what to do.
With wooden toys, it's simplicity at its best. Less is sometimes more.
Ever notice how your children have so much fun with an empty cardboard box their high tech toy comes in?
Wooden toys support open ended play and encourage children to learn through their play journey. Through open ended toys, children will be able to discover, create and explore by tapping on their creativity and imagination. This is an important part of their holistic growth and development.
3. Fosters Social Interaction
Children crave interaction. Many plastic toys cater to this need. They produce music and talk to children through the push of buttons. What happens is that this negates the need for children to play with others, and this becomes a solitary activity instead.
Through the simplicity of wooden toys, children will learn to be the voice of the toy and play alongside other children. They will learn to cooperate with their friends or siblings through role play to create an imaginary world. This is full of endless possibilities; as far as their creativity develops and takes them.
This develops social awareness as they learn to play together to achieve their shared goal.
4. Safe & Long Lasting
Children tend to be rough in play. Wooden toys are known to outlast their plastic equivalent as they are made from solid hard wood. It takes a lot more to damage a wooden toy as it would a brittle plastic one. The simplistic design of wooden toys also means that they are easier to keep clean. Unlike plastic toys which tend to get dirt trapped within the many crevices.
As such, wooden toys offer the opportunity to be passed down through generations making them a wonderful choice for a family heirloom toy.
5. Better for the Environment and your Child
Wooden toys are made from sustainably sourced wood and are more environmentally friendly as compared to plastic toys.
Also, wooden toys are eco-friendly being made from natural wood. Many are unpainted and sealed with natural oils and beeswax. This lends them to be a safer non-toxic option for your children as opposed to plastic toys.
One of the most wonderful qualities of wooden toys is that they are hand crafted by skilled makers with a heart for the environment. This sets wooden toys apart from their mass-produced plastic counterparts.
