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At Childcare, Kids Play With These!
While parents learn new Love and Logic parenting skills, their children spend time playing with educational wooden toys. Wooden blocks often have a lot more to offer children than many of the latest trendy educational toys. We bring these blocks out when taking care of children during a Love and Logic seminar. Why? Because of seven benefits hidden in each block of wood.*
- Wooden Blocks are Timeless
Of course, wooden blocks are trendy in their own right. In fact, they have been trendy for decades, if not centuries. Your grandparents and great-grandparents were learning with wooden toys when they were young and your grandchildren and great-grandchildren can also learn with wooden toys. While there are a lot of cool, new educational products out there, sometimes there’s value in sticking with the tried and true.
- Wooden Clocks Encourage Imagination
Wooden toys give children the ability to take control. 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. Since most wooden blocks don’t come with a preconceived purpose, they encourage children to stretch their imaginations even further.
- Wooden Blocks 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.
- Wooden Blocks Develop Reasoning Skills
Since wooden blocks don’t have voices or electronic parts to tell them what piece to pick up or what step to take next and they aren’t designed to fit a specific activity, children develop their reasoning skills as they learn with wooden toys.
- Wooden Blocks Support Problem-Solving
Wooden toys also have the ability to support problem-solving. On a more basic level, ch
ildren can use wooden toys to help provide visual representations of addition and subtraction problems. They can also be used to create logic puzzles for children to solve, to build towers that will withstand different forces acting upon them, or to create models to help represent different advanced math and science problems. Because wooden toys come in more general shapes and sizes, children will have to proble
m-solve to figure out how to make them fit certain scenarios rather than having the pre-made pieces that often come with other educational sets.
- Wooden Blocks Improve Hand-Eye Coordination
Because of their more basic shapes, wooden blocks also help children build hand-eye coordination. Activities such as building towers out of wooden blocks, carefully placing the pieces so the towers don’t topple over, or threading a string through a series of wooden beads, require children to pay attention to distance and placement. Children can also use wooden toys to begin to represent concepts such as over, under, beside, up, and down. When they solve puzzles or create patterns using wooden toys they also begin to visually see how items fit together, which also improves their hand-eye coordination.
- Wooden Blocks are Safe and Quiet
As children manipulate the wooden toys, you don’t have to worry much about their safety because wooden toys are designed to be safe. They are generally non-toxic and made from natural materials. You don’t have to worry about polluting your home with unknown chemicals or worry about what your child could possibly be eating. Not only will wooden toys not pollute your home with chemicals, they won’t pollute your home with a lot of noise. While this lack of noise keeps kids from being distracted, it also provides parents with the quiet they so often need during the day. Children cannot accidentally leave a wooden toy running or have to listen to incessant beeps and boops as they play.
As children grow, they will find different ways to use wooden toys to help build their imaginations, solve problems, and develop fine motor and reasoning skills. While they may not be the toys children see on television or at their friends’ homes, wooden blocks are the timeless toys that allow children to learn and grow every time they pull them out to play.
*Parts of this post were adapted from https://spielgaben.com/author/spielgaben/
Want affordable blocks for your kids to play with? Ask William Hurtado for the builder’s contact information!