Little children love playing with balls. Parents love them too because these toys are good for early development and encourages children to become more active. In fact, children can start playing with balls even at an early age because doing so helps them develop their fine motor skills and hand eye coordination. Wooden balls in particular are preferred by most parents because these toys are eco-friendly, generally safe and make early learning fun and enjoyable. These toys are definitely a must-have if you have little children at home. If you run out of gift ideas, you can never go wrong with a set of adorable wooden balls.
Wooden balls are multipurpose toys or open ended toys. This means that children are not bound to one style of play and they have the freedom to choose how they want to play these toys. Little children can play with wooden balls in so many ways. For example, they can use wooden balls as cargo for their mini trucks or toy cargo ships. This is only one of many things your children can do with wooden toys. So let’s take a look at other fun play ideas with wooden balls.
Arts & Crafts Projects Using Wooden Balls
Wooden balls are great materials for simple arts and crafts projects at home. Doing arts and crafts together with your children is a precious bonding moment for both parents and children as well as a good way to spark their creativity and imagination. Creativity and imagination are 2 of the important pillars of solid problem solving skills. People use creativity and imagination to solve real life problems and important to develop them at an early age.
There are many arts and crafts ideas that involve using wooden balls. You can buy wooden balls that are not painted and have your children paint them with their favourite colours. Use water based paints and dyes and buy art supplies that are non-toxic. Small wooden balls, otherwise known as wooden beads, are fantastic materials for making hobby crafts like bracelets, necklaces and other accessories (and beading has many developmental benefits). While your children string beads on your chosen beading cable or string, they are effectively using their fine motor skills and hand eye coordination.
Fun Games
Wooden balls often come in a wide range of colours. You can use these colourful wooden balls to start teaching your children about colours. Colour recognition is an important skill because our world is filled with colours. It will also help children communicate clearly by using colour to describe objects. Name a colour and ask your children to hand over the wooden ball of the same colour. Or you could hide wooden balls in your children’s nursery or playroom and ask them to look for a wooden ball of a specific colour.
Besides colour recognition, you can also teach your children how to sort wooden balls by colour and basic numeracy. Ask them to count how many balls are of the same colour and give you the right answer.
