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Why wooden toys help your children learn better
Every year, companies develop new wooden play 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.
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.
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.
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.
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