Wooden Toys

Wooden toys are great as gifts for children of all sorts of ages. Wooden toys come in a huge range of shapes, sizes and styles and are definitely not a reflection of yesteryear or a bygone era. Wooden toys can be big, small, light or heavy and are great for durability and also, for being used by children for all sorts of play ideas other than that which they were originally conceived for!

Here’s our round up of some great wooden toys that will become favourites in homes this Christmas and beyond…
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a story that pretty much every baby, toddler and child is told throughout their formative years – especially at tea time, when coercing more food into tired little people! So their wooden shape sorter clock is popular because it’s recognisable to begin with. Add in the learning of numbers, matching colours and shapes and it’s a great gift for smaller children. As they grow, they are also learning about telling the time even though they won’t appreciate it at that point – this is a great wooden toy because it represents all sorts of great aspects of learning through play.

More Hungry Caterpillar  toys are available as well and would be great as presents for boys and girls alike.

The Plum wooden balance bike is a great wooden toy for toddlers from age 2 upwards. Without peddles, this wooden toy gives toddlers a great way to get confident in using a bike and grows with them as the develop which is always a bonus with this type of item. Bikes without pedals are now very popular and are seen by many as the best way to get children using bikes from an early age without needing to use stabilisers. This would be a perfect present from grandparents, aunties and uncles or godparents – it’s something that will last for a long time, is practical and encourages children to be active in the outdoors – without the parents having to do too much hands on work themselves!

The Abney & Teal Wooden Dominoes are another great example of a wooden toy that is useful, fun and interactive for all sorts of activities. It was particularly popular with our child testers – they liked the characters and used the dominoes for matching and similarity games, as well as dominoes! You might assume that dominoes are for younger children but actually, they are very popular from age 4 right through to 8 years, because there’s a real element of challenge to the game when concentrating and children are very proud of succeeding through playing out the different options in their minds before making their choices of what to use.

We’ve also reviewed other toys from the Abney & Teal range with some being suitable from an earlier age – a great starting point for fans of the characters.

If you’re interested in finding out more about puzzles for different ages, have a look at the toys we’ve reviewed so far. They are not all wooden toys, but there’s some brilliant puzzles out there that will keep both the recipient and you engaged for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and beyond!

These are just three of the wooden toys that we’ve reviewed, researched and considered as part of our good toy work. To find out more about toys in general, have a look at our toy reviews, where you can refine your choices by age, learning type and toy type. If you’d like to know more about toys, how to make informed choices for children and what’s cool, top choice and popular, sign up to our free newsletter.

Categorised in: Christmas

This post was written by Dr Amanda Gummer