Friday Feature Week #8 – Why Children’s Wooden Toys Are Still Popular
You will find many wooden kids toys on the market today, especially if you shop online. Children’s wooden toys are made with quality craftsmanship in small family businesses as well as mass produced by large companies.
A natural made material, wood can be recycled and often wood blocks and indoor play sets are made from recycled materials. Wooden toys are more durable and children have always been more attracted to a wooden toy. When you teach your children to properly care for their children’s wooden toys they could possibly last their entire childhood and even be kept and passed down to their children.
When you see a room full of toys and children you may easily notice they gravitate to the toddler learning toys that are made of wood. Wood toys make us feel nostalgic. Wood is comforting and is one of the reasons they are worthy enough to be passed on from one generation to the next.
A Day at the Zoo Wooden Play Set
Wood toys remain a sensible choice for toddler toys and will keep your children busy playing for hours on end. Play is an essential part of all kid’s learning and emotional development. A wood toy is most often a toy that comes with no rules. Whether a truck, a doll house, a miniature farm animal set, or a play set such A Day at the Zoo children will be encouraged to learn by touching and exploring.
Parents and educators can utilize a child’s play time as an educational lesson as they ask open ended question pertaining to their play activities. The individual play pieces can be used in other make up games or incorporated in other games.
When you visit our website All I Can Imagine you may notice some changes. Many of the wooden toys have been discontinued and are no longer available. ImagiPLAY has been purchased by BeginAgain Toys, an eco-toy company based in Fort Collins, Colorado. This company is going to be offering many of the ImagiPLAY toys you are used to seeing online and they also plan on updating several of the current designs for release in 2012.
Updates will be provided on our website and this BLOG as they come available.
Christmas will be here before you know it; shop early!
Do You Know Who Said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”?
“For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand” continues Albert Einstein. So, it is nothing new that children explore their world through play and are more likely to develop healthy relationships when playing with open-ended toys.
Pretense, or the ability to engage in pretend play, is the child’s way of thinking. Children have the ability to use one thing to stand for another. Toddlers between ages 18 and 36 months will bring pretend play into full bloom and it is said that the roots of pretense extend back somewhat into infancy.
When selecting toddler learning toys one of the recommended toys are play sets. Providing your child with a playset with a theme he/she is most likely interested in will help ensure he will stay interested in the new toy.
Children love all the toy animal figures that are included in our wooden kids toys manufactured by ImagiPLAY. One such toddler toy for ages 3 up is our heirloom-quality, hand-crafted Noah’s Ark. This toy is destined to be a classic and comes with male and female animals creating 14 unique animals.
As a ”bonus” all the wooden animals store in the base of the Ark for safe keeping. The set also includes Mr. and Mrs. Noah. What fun your child will experience when he opens up this marvelous wooden toys this Christmas.
I was reading an interesting article about a father’s experience with his children getting hooked on his own On Line Flight simulator game. He realized, as his children played around with this game, that they could also learn engineering, design and architecture.
With his on line flight simulator game the kids could even make their own plane as well as design their own airport. They could fly to over 20,000 airports around the world, and he thought that getting kids to geographically know where all the airports were was quite an accomplishment.
If you have someone in your family who is interested in planes and they would love to open up the world of designing and building planes to toddler age children then here is a great toddler learning toy to get your boys and girls.
Quadro playsets come in five different varieties as well as a Vehicle Kit. These playsets come with a variety of modular tubes, panels, and connectors in bright colors. They can be played with outdoors or indoors.
With the Basic II as well as the Vehicle Kit parents and kids can together build an airplane and many other designs of cars, go carts, trucks, spaceships, racers, locomotives, houses, climbers and much more.
When you spend time designing, creating and building with your kids many lively topics of conversation will come easily. This is open-ended play with no rules so you can bond with your children while introducing them to many new experiences.
Even though preschoolers find fun and friendships with their peers, their most important relationships are with their parents and other family members. Therefore, it is important for adults to continuously help their preschoolers work out interpersonal difficulties in a positive way.
Parents teach children how to behave correctly because they love their children and the children will listen as a parent explains correct behavior because they care about the parent and their opinion of themselves. This effective socialization is therefore based on a high-quality attachment relationship.
As parents provide their children with open-ended toddler learning toys opportunities to learn proper social skills will automatically happen. Toys that have no “rules”, such as playsets, allow children to make up their own situations and parents can gently guide their play as needed.
Many of parents bonding experiences with their children can happen during open-ended playtime. Teaching opportunities easily open up while children are playing with themed play sets such as a farm, zoo or safari toys for toddlers.
Spending time with your child while he plays, and playing with him, has several benefits for parents and the child as well. While interacting with your child (or several children) they will be thriving in a stimulating environment.
Providing toddler learning toys that are open ended and provide a moderate challenge to your childs physical and cognitive abilities will make their playtime an educational experience without them knowing they are learning.
Adults providing close attention to children’s playtime, while being friendly and nurturing, will help all the children involved nurture one another. As parents are pointing to words in a book or an animal in a puzzle and begin talking about it the children will easily open up with their own ideas and questions.
During this type of playtime, if you as a parent have a particular lesson you want to teach, you can provide a hands-on learning experience that children will be interested in and they will easily absorb their lesson. This nurturing type of playtime is useful at home as well in child care and nursery school programs.
See our new A Day on the Farm Playset. We have just added a new wooden kids toy to our website that is a perfect educational toy for 3 year old boys and girls. Kids will love learning about farm animals as they play with each chunky wood figure. Cows, roosters, pigs and more!
Dr. Robert Agnew (a Professor of Music and Humanities at Edison State College in Piqua, Ohio) wrote an article “Ancient Humanity and the Night Sky” in which he talks about the understanding of astronomy and, though, he says, “there is much still to learn about ancient Egypt and ancient China, it appears that their understanding of astronomy was already quite advanced as much as five-thousand years ago.”
When introducing your children to the night sky and our solar system, you will have many good articles to ready by Dr. Agnew at: http://www.abc-learningfun4u.com/astronomytalk.html where most of his articles, according to what he says, are dealing with the night sky and how we understand it using telescopes.
Our ancestors and early sailors used the night sky for navigation way before telescopes were ever thought of. I am always amazed when I remember how many hundreds of miles were sailed and navigated with only the stars that God put in our sky.
Because of ancient peoples who sailed the seas and oceans and their love of the heavenly sky, their curiosity and endurance to face hardships led to many discoveries of faraway lands such as America.
ZOOM TO THE MOON: Get your child one of our children’s wooden toys from our selection of playsets. As you teach your children about space and our planets their lessons will be enhanced when playing with our 5 X 8” Velcro-closure rocketship. Receive seven wooden figures including aliens and two space people along with the rocketship.
Travel in our sky, the inventions of airplanes and rocket ships, are only possible because of years of trial and error that men and women paid for with their lives. We should never take their sacrifices lightly.
Make sure to visit the link above and read many interesting articles to help in your children’s education. Dr. Agnew has written such articles as: “Music and the Stars”, “Ancient Rocks”, “Ghosts of the Night”, and more and you may read them by clicking on the links.
Great white bears are not left-pawed. Scientists observing the animals haven’t noticed a preference. In fact, polar bears seem to use their right and left paws equally.
Use of tools. Polar bears do not use tools, including blocks of ice, to kill their prey. Scientist Ian Stirling believes that this idea may have come about because, after failing to catch a seal, a frustrated and angry polar bear may kick the snow, slap the ground—or hurl chunks of ice.
Hollow hair conducts UV light. A polar bear’s hollow hairs do not conduct ultraviolet light to its black skin. This theory was tested—and disproved—by physicist Daniel Koon.
Covering its nose. Contrary to a legend among native hunters, polar bears do not cover their black noses while lying in wait for seals. Canadian biologist Ian Stirling, who has spent several thousand hours watching polar bears hunt, has never seen this behavior. Nor have other scientists.
Bi-polar bears? Polar bears live only in Arctic areas that surround the North Pole—not in Antarctica, which surrounds the South Pole. School children often see illustrations of penguins and polar bears together, but this could never happen. In fact, the word arctic comes from the Greek word for bear, and Antarctic comes from the Greek meaning the opposite, without bear.
The above was gathered from: http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/polar-bears/bear-essentials-polar-style/myths-and-misconceptions
Remember to visit our website All I Can Imagine for your wooden kids toys. We have beautiful wood playsets for indoor play. See our Arctic Expedition that includes a tote-able Velcro-closure Igloo tote and 9 chunky wooden figures – for ages 3 up.
The development of gross motor skills for your toddlers is very important! Providing your kid’s playsets with chunky pieces that they easily can grasp and play with will help their muscles develop.
Besides providing your children playsets, giant toy blocks and a variety of other wooden kids toys, Theraputty is another great idea to give your children. Theraputty is a strong silly-putty-like material that comes in a tub. It comes in various “strengths” so there is more or less resistance when squeezed.
Working on a variety of hand skills, it is easy to play with anytime and anywhere – it’s fun and kids love it. Here is a website where you can purchase some Cando Theraputty. http://www.allegromedical.com/exercise-fitness-c523/cando-theraputty-p555170.html
Each Cando Theraputty is color-coded and has a different consistency ranging from XX-Soft for strengthening the weakest grasp to X-Firm for developing a stronger grip. Available in convenient easy-open plastic containers. Store you putty in this container when play is done and seal the lid tightly so it does not dry out.
You might want to try a couple of different strengths when you first buy this product. It is good for kids, teens, adults and seniors. It’s just good, fun exercise for your hands.
Remember to see our puzzle playsets at All I Can Imagine. There are three themes of floor puzzles; Rainforest, Dinosaur and Sealife and each of our playsets have chunky pieces that children age 3 up can play with to help them strengthen and develop fine motor skills.
Growing up I was lucky enough to live near Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. As an adult I used to walk there on my lunch hour for a quick retreat.
With spring in the air it’s time to begin planning a zoo outing with your kids. But if you do not live near a zoo you could provide your kids with one of our children’s wooden toys from our toddler toy collection of playsets.
Our zoo toy is one of our beautiful, fun-filled toddler learning toys that will bring hours of creative play to kids age 3 and up. Our zoo toy includes eleven hand-painted animals, a three piece zoo entrance, a penguin pond and four fences.
Besides providing children wooden playsets it is fun to make simple crafts with your kids. There are several zoo themed ideas I found at this website: http://www.freekidcrafts.com/zoo.html. One that I particularly liked was the Giraffe paper bag puppet. (I have always liked puppets and they are great toddler learning toys.)
Giraffe Paper Bag Puppet – Print out one of the giraffe templates ( color – or – black and white). Color the giraffe, if necessary, and cut out the 2 parts. Glue the giraffe’s head to the bottom of a small lunch-sized paper bag. Lift up the fold and glue in the neck of the giraffe so that when you put your hand inside the bag it looks like the giraffe has a head on top of a neck.
Visit our website today and see all our children’s wooden toys!
A child’s brain is likened to a sponge and absorbs enormous amounts of a variety of information. Because the brain continues to expand as it grows it is important to expose your children to a variety of open-ended wooden kids toys.
Not only are children exposed to a variety of toddler learning toys at home, there are wooden toys in their daycare, Sunday school and waiting rooms. Where ever your children are becomes an opportunity for teaching opportunities.
You can help your children learn colors, for example, while sitting in the doctor’s office. If you put down your magazine and observe the toddler toys available you could point out to your child a chair and say to him “this is a chair. The color of the chair is blue”.
Quality education is most important to the mental health and growth of all young children and it is because of this that you will find it beneficial to surround your children with playsets, wood puzzles and other toys that have a variety of shapes and colors to keep your children interested in play and learning.
Your child may love playing with a Sealife puzzle playset pictured above. Each chunky puzzle piece is it’s own creature including a sea horse, crab and turtle. Made from splinter-proof wood this is one of our toddler learning toys is for ages 3 up.
