Educationally valuable wooden toy
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Von
Melanie A.
Educational toys: How wooden toys promote children's development
Play is an integral part of a child's life. Ideally, play not only provides fun and entertainment, but also supports your child's development. This is exactly where educational toys come in.
This article is dedicated to the question of what "educationally valuable" actually means in the context of toys. It also goes into detail about the benefits of educational toys and explains why wooden toys from Eichhorn are a good choice from an educational point of view.
Why should children play with educational toys?
"The source of all good lies in play." This well-known quote from the German educationalist Friedrich Fröbel sums up the great importance of play in childhood. It clearly shows that the meaning and benefits of play go far beyond mere entertainment, which is of course particularly true of educational toys .
What does pedagogically valuable even mean?
Pedagogy deals with the upbringing and education of children both theoretically and practically. An educationally valuable toy therefore contributes to education and upbringing and supports a child's development in many ways by having an educational and formative effect.
Why do children play?
On the surface, fun is certainly one aspect that motivates children to play. But there is much more to it than that. Play allows children to use their imagination, try things out and explore different facets of themselves.
This makes play a child-friendly form of personal development in which children gain formative experiences through play, learn to understand the world and, not least, get to know themselves better.
What role do wooden toys play in children's development?
Archaeological discoveries suggest that children were already playing with wooden toys in the Stone Age. The history of wooden toys therefore goes back a long way, and wood is still one of the most popular materials in the toy industry today. And that's no coincidence! Below we highlight the benefits of wooden toys and explain what makes wood the ideal material for making educational toys:
Advantages of wooden toys over plastic toys
Unlike plastic, wood is a natural material and poses no risks to your child's health. While some plastic toys contain harmful substances and should not be put in the mouth, for example, you don't have to worry about any health risks with high-quality wooden toys.
The natural wooden surface also offers your child a special sensory experience and invites them to engage with the sense of touch.
Compared to often overloaded plastic toys, educational wooden toys from Eichhorn offer a timeless, understated aesthetic. This design not only encourages your child's aesthetic sensibilities and creativity, but also enables freer, imaginative play without strict rules. Wooden toys therefore invite your child to create a variety of play scenarios based entirely on their imagination.
Another advantage: wooden toys are sustainable. They are made from a renewable raw material that is biodegradable and has a long service life. Children can easily play with high-quality, well-made wooden toys for decades without the educational toy being damaged. If minor damage does occur, it can often be easily repaired. Educational wooden toys are therefore an investment that your child can enjoy throughout their entire childhood.
Learning and development opportunities through educational toys made of wood
Asdescribed at the beginning, educational toys traditionally offer children valuable incentives to develop and learn. This encouragement relates to very different areas, depending on which toy your child uses and how exactly they engage with it.
On the one hand, wooden toys promote creative skills by encouraging children to develop and implement their own play ideas.
When playing together with other children, such as siblings, the focus is on social interaction: children learn to communicate their ideas, respond to suggestions from other players and resolve conflicts. These experiences help them to understand and respect their own needs and those of others, while at the same time improving their language skills.
On the other hand, educational wooden toys support development on a cognitive level: your child's ability to concentrate and logical thinking can improve by training their patience and strengthening their ability to recognize patterns and connections. Emotionally, it offers space to deal with one's own emotional world and promotes empathy as children process everyday emotional experiences in a playful way and learn to put themselves in the shoes of others.
Sustainability and environmental friendliness of wooden toys
The sustainability of wooden toys lies in their durability and robustness, which makes the frequent purchase of short-lived plastic toys superfluous. This protects the environment considerably. In addition, you can further increase sustainability by not disposing of worn-out wooden toys, but passing them on to younger children or donating them.
As an absolutely sustainable and natural product, educational wooden toys are ideal as a "hook" to teach your child about the importance of environmentally conscious purchasing and consumer behavior. By playing with the educational toys, you can deal with environmental friendliness and sustainability in a playful way that is appropriate for your child's age. In this way, you support your child in developing their environmental awareness and sensitize them to these important topics in a child-friendly way.
Individuality and personal development through wooden toys
A visit to the Eichhorn store shows just how versatile our educational wooden toys are. Our range covers various areas of interest, making it easy to find toys that promote your child's individual talents and preferences. With a little time, you'll discover products that perfectly match your child's skills and interests and could quickly become their new favorite toy.
If an educational toy is the perfect fit for your child, independent learning is also possible. Your child will be more than happy to play with the product and will not necessarily need the guidance of an adult or the company of a fellow player. As a result, they can learn to keep themselves busy, deal with minor difficulties independently and trust in their own abilities.
Wooden puzzles, building blocks and more: more than just simple toys
The wide range of products that you can discover at Eichhorn is full of educational toys for the age-appropriate development of your child. In the following, we would like to give you an overview of the different types of stimulating toys and show you how your child can benefit from playing with our wooden toys.
Construction toys and wooden trains
We are starting with a product category that many children love: construction toys. With the Eichhorn Constructor fire engine wooden construction set with three building variants, the first step is to start building, because 155 wooden parts and connecting elements need to be assembled to make a fire engine, a police car or an ambulance. While building, your child can put their fine motor skills to the test, use their powers of concentration and apply their logical thinking. Afterwards, the focus is on play: what adventures will your child set off on with the vehicle they have built themselves?
Our Color wooden building blocks show that even toys for 2-year-olds can be educationally valuable. Little builders use them to create all kinds of colorful structures, practicing the targeted grasping and placement of objects and exploring the first physical principles of geometry and symmetry. Things get even more exciting with our wooden trains, a popular educational toy from the age of 3. As the driver of the remote-controlled Eichhorn train, your child can travel on a variety of routes. Each train set can be extended as required with matching tracks, points and accessories. Your child can build circular tracks, accelerate on straight tracks, cross a tunnel or take the train to the engine shed for maintenance - lots of imaginative train rides await you!
Wooden puzzles
Wooden puzzles are the epitome of educational toys that encourage patience and perseverance. The various tricky puzzles present your child with small challenges that they can master using their imagination, fine motor skills and logical thinking. Little puzzle fans from the age of one can look forward to animal puzzle fun with the five-piece tactile puzzle with farm animals, which also stimulates the sensory system thanks to the combination of wood and fabric. Kids from the age of 4 can learn to recognize patterns with our Tetris game or "play" the ability to read the time from analogue clocks with the strong learning clock.
Role-playing toys and doll's houses
Educational toys from the role-play toy category bring a big dose of imagination into play. By slipping into different roles, your child can get to know different facets of themselves and play out creative stories that spring from their own imagination. For example, they can use the Eichhorn play kitchen to play out scenarios that they are familiar with from everyday life or bring completely imaginative play ideas to life. Perhaps they would like to get a taste of the country air on the Eichhorn farm with accessories and explore the advantages and challenges of country life in the role of a farmer? Or he can get to work at the Eichhorn workbench with saw, hammer and screws in the role of a talented craftsman - there are no limits to the imagination!
The same applies when playing with our doll's houses. With the Eichhorn doll's house with furniture and play figures, your child can try out what the social role of father and mother feels like and imitate behaviors from everyday family life. By playing together with family or friends, your child will develop their social and language skills by engaging in lively dialogs and experiencing social situations through play. They learn to respond to the emotions of others, solve problems together and express their own feelings. Role-playing games therefore not only promote emotional and interpersonal skills, but also help to explore and understand empathic reactions through play.
Crafting and painting
Little artists and creative minds get their money's worthwith educational toys from the crafting & paintingcategory . High-quality creative products, such as the Eichhorn wooden bead set flower, promise relaxing crafting fun together with siblings, parents and friends.
Working with beads has a number of practical developmental effects: grasping and threading trains fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, while the many design options encourage imagination and creative thinking. By creating unique pieces of jewelry themselves, your child also develops their sense of aesthetics and can express their own ideas, preferences and feelings. This boosts self-confidence, not to mention the feeling of pride that your child will experience when they put on their self-made necklaces and bracelets for the first time and admire them in the mirror.
Find the right educational wooden toy for your child
The perfect educational toy is the one that is ideally suited to your child and their stage of development. It is therefore essential to take your time when making a purchase decision and think about which educational wooden toys will benefit your child the most at the moment.
An important decision criterion here is the age specification of the toy manufacturer. It should be seen as a rough guide. After all, nurturing toys for babies differ from educational toys from the age of 3, and wooden toys for older children are designed differently again. Toys that are not suitable for your child's age group can lead to over- or underchallenge. Therefore, in addition to following the manufacturer's instructions, assess for yourself how far along your child is in their development. After all, nobody knows your child as well as you do.
The child's interests should also be taken into account when choosing a toy. A toy that is basically educational but does not arouse your child's interest is not serving its intended purpose. For this reason, you should definitely look out for products that pick up on content that your child is enthusiastic about.
Educational toys develop their maximum effect when your child plays with them in an appropriate environment that promotes educationally valuable play. Your task is therefore to design the playroom or children's room in such a way that your child feels comfortable in it and can engage with their stimulating toys undisturbed. First of all, this requires a certain basic order. If there is pure chaos in the children's room, this reduces the "feel-good factor" on the one hand, but on the other hand the disorder also has a distracting effect. Children in particular, who already find it difficult to concentrate on one thing for any length of time, find it hard to keep their focus on an educational toy in a chaotic environment. Ideally, every educational toy should have a fixed place in the playroom. For example, the dolls belong in the box under the bed, the building blocks are stored on the wall shelf and the puzzles belong in a specific drawer. This way, your child always knows exactly where to find which toy and can put it back independently after playing.
When designing a play environment, the principle of "less is more" applies . A cluttered children's room can disrupt concentration and make it difficult to engage with educationally valuable toys. The aim should be to provide a careful selection of quality toys without overloading the room. You don't have to dispose of superfluous toys, but can store them in boxes. Unused toys can be easily replaced to ensure variety without the room looking cluttered.
In addition to creating a stimulating play environment, you can also support your child's play experience by suggesting meaningful, educational play ideas. We would like to give you a few examples to inspire you:
Exploring colors and shapes with building blocks
Younger children are often fascinated by the world of colors and shapes, which is why it makes sense to pick up on these themes in play . You can do this with wooden building blocks, for example. Our colorful wooden building blocks can be used by children from the age of 1 and bring them into contact with basic colors and simple geometric shapes. You can sort the rectangles, squares, cylinders and triangles in green, blue, yellow and red by color or shape, for example. Or you can encourage your child to build a tower using only green building blocks. It is also possible to sort the elements according to their height or width and to count the bricks of one color or shape. With the latter game suggestion, numbers are added as further valuable learning content.
Telling stories
The best playtime is often the time when creative, exciting stories come to life directly from your child's imagination. As an accompanying adult, you can of course actively initiate this creative storytelling process. This starts by offering your child suitable toys. Role-playing toys that open the door to new worlds for your child are particularly suitable. With the Eichhorn magnetic board, your child becomes a teacher who will certainly know how to teach you as a pupil. You can stimulate the flow of play by, for example, holding out your hand and asking a question, asking the "teacher" to explain something in more detail or suggesting a completely different lesson topic.
Does your child like to look over your shoulder at home? Then they will love our small table kitchen with stove and sink or the eight-piece chopping board set. These educational wooden toys allow for an interesting role reversal: for a change, you are the hungry child waiting for food at the table while your child conjures up a dish and assures you that it won't take much longer. Scenarios from the home environment in particular can also be played out wonderfully with doll's houses, whereby your child can switch back and forth between the roles of father, mother and child as the mood takes them. You can set up initial scenarios before you start playing together and suggest new play situations to your child.
You can also use imaginative play to repeatedly ask your child to describe the current play situation in more detail. Ask questions about what is happening and invite your child to immerse themselves even more intensively in the game and to put into words what they perceive and do in an understandable way. For example, if you are currently playing with the large Eichhorn horse stable, you could ask the names of the horses, ask which horses have already been fed or ask which horses get on particularly well with each other. By asking such small questions, you keep the game lively and give the game scenarios more depth.
Make music
Admittedly: Making music with children is not always a treat for the ears. Nevertheless, it is a play idea that is extremely valuable from an educational point of view . As an educational toy, Eichhorn music toys are sometimes suitable for training the ear, encouraging the development of a feeling for harmonic tone sequences and awakening an interest in music in general. Once your child is familiar with their instrument, you can, for example, suggest that they practise a piece of music they have made up themselves. Siblings or grandparents will certainly enjoy a private concert.
Go out
Educational play doesn't just take place in the nursery ! Eichhorn outdoor toys provide an extra dose of encouragement for fun in the fresh air and motivate your child to get moving and test their physical abilities. The compact lattice swing, for example, gets even the youngest children from the age of one moving, while our 2in1 gymnastics set presents more experienced climbing monkeys with new challenges. Our play idea: Set up various play stations with different educational toys for outside in the garden or park and organize an active afternoon of outdoor play.
Eichhorn toys - a reliable friend for childhood
Educational toys encourage your child's development and help them to fulfill their potential. Wooden products also have the advantage of being durable, natural and sustainable.
With educational wooden toys from the Eichhorn store, you are making an all-round excellent choice and creating the best conditions for wonderfully fun playtime with high educational value.