Wooden Toys have been around more or less since people figured out how to carve them. From simple dolls to complex three dimensional puzzles, wooden toys are still a lot of fun. This is especially true for younger kids who learn by playing with different kinds of toys.

For kids as young as one and old as three, the right toys can make a big difference in how their early brains develop. Wooden toys can make for a fun and safe way for them to learn that isn’t overly reliant on technology. Still, with young children, finding toys that are safe for their group is paramount. With the right tools for the right age, though, your kids can have fun and develop important life skills at the same time.

Multifunctional motor skill development

Kids have a reputation for clumsiness and a lack of coordination, and that’s because they’re bodies and brains haven’t developed the finer motor skills of adults yet. For toddlers, their bones and bodies are still developing too, so toys that help with motor skills and coordination are excellent choices.

For example, a tap bench with attached musical toys, like a xylophone, are excellent for one-year olds to pound away at with increased precision. The sounds will excite them and motivate increased precision, or at least keep them busy for a while.

Activity cubes are an excellent choice for development of hand-eye coordination, another important skill for growing brains and bodies. Little trails of colored beads and cubes along metal rings of various designs, along with toy blocks to sort into patterns, are great fun for little kids, and even kids at heart enjoy moving the little trains of beads around.

Wheeled fun

Speaking of trains, wooden trains are great toys for toddlers. Wooden trains for kids can get pretty long, are carefully manufactured with smoothed edges and no sharp corners, attach with magnets, and generally come in bright colors.

Plus, kids love trains. Buying a wooden train set by Amish Furniture Factory will ensure your toddler has hours of fun playing train. Just be prepared that they might want actual model sets when they get older, which are also a fun way to develop various life skills.

Along with trains, toy wooden cars are a good choice for three year olds and below. Metal or plastic toy cars have small parts or are small enough that they are a choking hazard, but wooden cars are built big and tough, so they can handle what a toddler can dish out in most cases. They might be a target come teething, though, so keep that in mind.

Wooden puzzles

Large wooden puzzles are also great for young kids, because the pieces are large enough that they can’t swallow them like with standard jigsaw pieces. There are other benefits of course, like the fact that making puzzles is fun.

Puzzles also help develop problem solving skills, hand eye coordination, and learning about different shapes and how the interact. These puzzles come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and complexity for different age groups.

Of course, puzzles make for a fun, cozy group activity, which means you and your kids can enjoy building these three-dimensional puzzles. When they’re done, you can display them on your child’s bedroom dresser, where they will probably get knocked over and rebuilt again, because that’s what kids do sometimes.

Along with big puzzles made from fun shapes, there are also wooden matching puzzles for toddlers. These toys often involve matching colorful pieces to images of pets or other animals. Such toys help kids learn critical thinking, association, problem solving, coordination, and, of course, are another fun activity you can do with them.

Hearing development

While learning coordination and problem solving are important for young children, learning about various sounds and how they can change or be changed is a part of growing up as well. Toy drums and other wooden toys based on musical instruments help them develop such skills.

Toys like drums and rattles not only keep kids occupied with fun sounds and music, it also helps them learn about rhythm and hand-eye coordination. Certain motions and actions create certain sounds, and, while practicing a song is certainly not happening for several more years, learning how to make a simple rhythm is a strong start.

Object permanence development

The downside for toys for young toddlers is that they don’t have object permanence just yet. If you hide a toy behind your hand, they will think it’s gone forever. However, around two years old, kids start to realize that the toy is, in fact, still there.

Toys can help with the development of and growth of object permanence and memory growth, and wooden toys are a safe way to build such skills. Toys like this often involve balls placed into holes, where the balls will disappear for a moment, then reappear in a different hole.

Such toys might confuse a younger toddler, but for those learning that items and people don’t disappear just because you can’t see them, these sorts of toys are a great way to help kids develop memory and object skills.

When in doubt, blocks

Who didn’t grow up with colorful wooden blocks carved with numbers and letters? Perhaps one of the oldest wooden toys ever made, wooden blocks are honestly just simple fun for all ages. They can be stacked, lined up, set into shapes, formed into words or basic math problems, and just used to build stuff from blocks.

A great toy for young kids, the blocks are large enough that kids can’t swallow them, though some might want to chew on them come teething. The same is true for pets, who might also enjoy playing with the blocks. Another important life skill is learning to share, after all.

Different toys for all skills and ages

Wooden toys may not have the flash of modern toys or digital devices, but they offer lots of fun for young kids. Having fun while developing crucial skills is an important part of growing up, and wooden toys are a great way to promote such learning.

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