Do you remember the last time you played with a wooden toy? If it’s been a while, then you’re in for a treat! Wooden toys are making a comeback and for good reason.
There are many benefits of wooden toys. Not only are they environmentally friendly and made from sustainable materials, but they also help to develop important skills in children.
Best Wooden Toys: 25 Quality Picks
With the wide variety of wooden toy sets on the market, there is something here for every child – whether they’re just starting out with their first toy or looking for a new challenge.
Along with the traditional classic toy, like wooden cars, musical toys and wooden blocks, young kids have a wide range of choice these days when it comes to natural world play.
We know how important it is to fill a child’s box with educational and developmental award-winning toys or toys to help with fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, or even problem-solving skills.
Baby and toddler toys should not only provide hours of fun but learning and enrichment in all of a child’s key skill areas. Wooden toys for kids all help with the development of these necessary skills, just as well if not better than their plastic counterparts.
The wonderfully wide variety of traditional toys aim to do just that, whilst encouraging different styles of play. This then ensures a well-rounded play and learning experience.
Sustainable Toys
We are passionate about looking after the planet that our children will grow up in. After all, we are safeguarding it for our future generations to enjoy.
Therefore we have aimed to find a wide variety of modern and traditional toys that are a mixture of organic, natural, fair trade, and handmade from sustainable materials such as beech wood, maple wood, and rubber wood amongst others.
From traditional brands like Plan Toys, up to modern brands like Tender leaf toys, Manhattan Toy Company and Tegu magnetic wooden blocks, natural wood toys are perfect for all babies and toddlers.
Many of these toys have been lovingly handcrafted from sustainably harvested wood. Each item is decorated with non-toxic water-based paints or stains that are bright and vivid enough to pique young imaginations.
Each beautiful piece could easily be passed down to generations as heirlooms, and many of them are beautiful enough to become a well-loved part of your room decoration as well as being fantastic toys.
Open-Ended Play
We have gone out of our way to bring together a great collection of the best toys for open-ended play. Most are open-ended, perfect if you are following the Steiner education model. Our toy selection encourages pretend play, creative play, and imaginative play.
Each has a purpose and a place in a child’s development, helping them reach developmental milestones.
Encourage different types of play with beautiful toys
- Pretend play – with our wooden toy set, dolls houses, baby dolls, dinosaurs, animals, cars trucks and trailers, train tracks, trains, and boats, children’s wooden furniture, tool sets & workbenches, so your child can create different places for their many characters to visit and play in. Wooden Shop Toys is another thing you can have a look at for your kids.
- Creative play – building blocks, jigsaw puzzles, musical instruments, easels, and craft supplies. Spark your child’s creative side as they serenade you with their own compositions, draw you a variety of masterpieces and build houses, towers, and palaces.
- Imaginative play – Watch as your child uses their open-ended toys along with construction pieces and the Way to Play snap circuits to create all manner of different games and situations, the possibilities are endless and your child’s imagination will stretch to find different lands and adventures.
Of course, there are more such toys in the market. Children’s Wooden furniture is one of the most popular in the market if you want to give your children a playhouse.
Educational Toys and Games
Encourage all these types of play will help with a variety of key skill areas of development including, emotional development, speech and language skills, cognitive and brain development, social skills, gross motor development, creative thinking, and physical development.
These key skills are essential in helping to shape a child’s future mental and physical health.
Learning begins at birth and we hope that our beautiful selection of discovery toys, sensory toys, and teethers will help to set babies on the right path as they start to take in the world and their surroundings.
As they play they will learn how to make toys create different sounds and what happens when they put them down. This, in turn, teaches object permanence, cause and effect, and basic fine motor development.
Wooden Toys for Toddlers
Our toddler section includes basic educational toys and science kits such as our magnetic sets and abacuses to teach basic math skills. These STEM toys form a vital part of preschool learning and become increasingly important as your child grows.
As kids partake in learning activities they are constantly developing their learning capabilities and carefully considered toys aim to make these activities fun whilst learning to count, they actually can make counting great fun.
Children love to play with their parents and friends and we have many games and jigsaw puzzles to encourage this. Children will learn the importance of teamwork and how to share as they interact with other people.
Wooden blocks made from sustainably sourced wood and traditional train sets are perfect for group play. Encourage children to work together to draw a plan for their wooden railway and then build the different outlays they have designed.
Next, they can use their different-shaped blocks to make the buildings that surround their railways or castles. Once built children can use a train or truck to transport their figurines to their bedroom or playroom around the world they’ve created. The fine details in many of our toys make every girl and boy love to discover new games.
These developmental wooden toys for children are brilliant and will help them thrive as they grow including those with a developmental delay or autism. You’ll watch as your baby becomes a prime mover with our range of pull objects and different sets of wheels to push along or ride on. These wooden toys are available from bigjigs wooden. Note we no longer sell le toy van toys or melissa doug due to quality concerns, we only sell high quality durable toys.
Why wooden toys are better than plastic
We love wooden toys and children do too. In general, they are healthier, safer, and more environmentally friendly than plastic toys. Now we’re not saying that plastic toys don’t have their place. You only have to look at lego to realize that there are some plastic toys that last for generations and are timeless.
However, there are plenty of reasons why you might not want to fill your child’s toy box with all the latest shiny toys.
Wooden toys are timeless
Wooden toys, in general, have far better longevity than plastic toys. Not only in the fact that they are made of wood, which lasts well and can be mended. But also in that, they are generally simpler and less ‘faddy’.
Almost everybody will have played with a set of wooden blocks at some point in their lives. They are superbly simple and yet can be used in so many ways, they are fun for years, and they help develop loads of vital skills.
Your child may be desperate for the lastest paw patrol fire engine, but the likelihood is it will get put to one side pretty quickly when their favourite show changes. However, a wooden fire engine could belong to Marshall, Fireman Sam or anyone else. And it can be passed onto friends or future generations.
Wooden toys are better for the planet
Wood, unlike plastic, is a sustainable resource. It grows fairly quickly and can be replaced. Plus at the end of its life it’s biodegradable and so can be disposed of in a far safer and easier way.
We’ve carefully chosen toys made from sustainable woods such as rubberwood. Rubber trees are only cut down when they stop producing rubber to make way for new trees. The wood is essentially a waste product of the rubber industry, and what better way to use it than to make educational, stimulating toys that will be cherished and enjoyed.
Plastic toys, on the other hand, are made from oil. A non-renewable resource that cannot be replaced. Plastic toys often also contain electronic components that break easily and make the toys far harder to recycle.
However there are some amazing plastic toys such as green toys that are made entirely from recycled milk cartons, they are great in the bath and for outdoor play, so as we say it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
Wooden toys are better for your Children
As well as having obvious environmental benefits wooden toys are also better for your child in a number of ways.
Firstly plastic toys can contain BPA known to be a hormone disruptor and PVC which can contain known carcinogens. So it’s vital to check what plastic toys are made from before buying them. Especially as we all know how often toys end up in little mouths.
It’s worth noting here that not all wooden toys are completely safe either. Many low priced wooden toys are made of ply which can contain all sorts of chemicals, and not all paints and stains are safe either so it’s always worth checking.
Secondly, wooden toys tend to be simpler and more open-ended in design. This encourages children to be more creative and imaginative in their play. An electronic plastic toy very obviously does one thing, whereas toys without an obvious single-use can become anything your child desires.
Flashy plastic toys can also risk over-stimulating little minds which can actually cause developmental delay.
