Wooden Building Blocks - A Fun Learning Toy

Children simply love wooden building blocks. The simplicity of the toy is it's main attraction and captivates young minds. The important part is that these toys provide an important contribution to the child's learning and development.
Wooden toys, when properly designed and manufactured, have long served as important learning tools for children to experiment, through play, with their world.

Life skills such as reasoning, critical thinking and eye-hand coordination are all exercised through play with wooden building blocks. Many children develop social skills through sharing with one another and by explaining their creations with others.
The excitement is always fun to watch as it not only affords an opportunity for children to express themselves but it also gives an insight into their unbridled imagination.
Children soon learn geometric relationships, what will work and what won't, and then they use their imagination to create marvelous structures.

It's all fun and much more importantly it's all learning. Wooden toys by their very nature are durable and safe for children. The one issue to watch out for is that they are not so small as to present a choking hazard for the child.

Most wooden toys are made large enough to be safe for even infants but choking hazards always have to be evaluated by parents.
Wooden building blocks and other wooden toys have several other advantages over their plastic and metal counterparts.

Wood, by its very nature is a renewable resource, thus the only green choice - especially if the wood is from a responsible managed forest.

After years of hard play, wooden toys might get dented a little, but they will continue to serve as a source of entertainment and learning for even generations.
In contrast, plastic toys usually fail by actually breaking and presenting sharp, dangerous edges that are obviously unsafe and render the toy useless.

In addition to being almost always painted, metal toys can be bent and often get scratched and then rusted, again making them unsuitable as a play thing. The type or species of wood and finish are worth mentioning as points of consideration. Hundreds of years of experience indicate that wooden building blocks and wooden toys are best when made from a dense, tight grained hardwood.
These qualities not only enable the toy to take years of hard play but also have been shown to not splinter or warp.

Species such as rock maple, bass wood, sugar maple, and beech have long been the preferred choice for wooden toy makers.

Unfinished wooden educational toys are the best and safest choice for finish; however in the case of alphabet blocks and such, paint or dye is an important feature.

When selecting painted wooden building blocks the manufacturing source and type of coloration should be checked carefully prior to purchase.