Why the simplest toys for a child?

Wooden blocks

If you could go with your children to a deserted island and if you were allowed to take with you only one toy, what would it be? I would probably choose wooden blocks. Why? There are a lot of reasons:

1. Wooden blocks is a toy suitable for all ages

Babies are already interested in them. Initially biting and throwing, then happily destroying the towers built by the parent, to finally start to set one block on the other. With age, small towers grow into cities, castles, palaces or gardens. Or quite differently, depending on the topic that the child is interested in at the moment.

2. A set of blocks can grow with your child

Babies only need a few basic blocks, but on the next occasion you can buy another set and so on endlessly. There are, after all, various blocks on the market, in various colors, shapes, often even with additional pictures - blocks are drawn on some of them.

On other petrol stations or road signs, and on other characters from cartoons, people or animals that can play in enjoy the various scenes. And it does not really matter what brand or type, all wooden blocks match. Although sometimes it takes some work to fit them.

3. Blocks develop the imagination

Among other things, because creating structures from such blocks develops spatial imagination, which is the basis of later mathematical abilities. It's not so easy to adjust everything properly, make the blocks fit together. Especially if we choose ones that have different sizes.

4. All blocks practice small and large motor skills

But wooden ones work much better in this matter than plastic ones that can be permanently connected. With wooden blocks, much more precise movements are needed, because any inadvertent hand swipe can end up scattering the entire structure into a small poppy. But wooden blocks can help develop motor skills in infants who do not yet create complex structures.

For them, just catching a block will be a challenge. And yet this is just the beginning - then comes the time of throwing, collecting, building towers. With time so high that to add another block you have to get up, and then run away when the tower starts banging.

More complicated buildings require more and more precise movements of a small hand, until the child gains confidence and moves quickly and accurately on its construction site.

Wooden blocks also have the advantage over Lego blocks, that you can easily and quickly make a "bach!" A tower built by a mother or a dad - this advantage is especially appreciated by the youngest builders.

5. The block can be anything!

Wooden blocks develop imagination and creativity, because they allow you to build almost everything that a child is able to come up with. But not only because the blocks will also work perfectly in other games. Most of them do not have strictly assigned functions, which is why in the imagination they can become virtually everything.

After all, the car will always remain a car, and the block can one day pretend to be a car, another one that is a hospital bed, another one, that the wall of the house, or cat food. The children's imagination will easily add details that the producer did not consider.

6. You can use them for a lot of things and very many games

Here are examples:

As a standard, you can build blocks for the building itself, but sometimes you can modify it. Try to build a house that can be seen through the window? Or, being in the city, pay attention to the child's building, ask if he / she would like to build something like that from blocks?

Sometimes instead of starting with building, start with the plan - let the child first paint what he would like to build. Thanks to such games you can learn a lot.
with blocks you can build a scenery to play with other things: a city for toy cars, a doll house, rubble after an earthquake for a rescue action for firemen ...

Used as ?

They can be used not only as building blocks, but also as props in games. Without a problem, they will become a horse's hay, a doll's lunch, a telephone, a coal that needs to be transported somewhere ...
they are suitable for the exercise of perceptiveness and spatial imagination. Exemplary play: the parent builds a construction, and the child's task is to reproduce it.
You can use them to learn counting, adding, subtracting. They can be count simply, you can also prepare containers marked with numbers, and the task of the child is to put in the containers the number of blocks corresponding to the number on the container. You can even use them to learn the multiplication table and to invent more complicated tasks.
They will also prove useful in the process of learning to read and write. It's enough to stick the letters on the blocks and put words into them.
This is not all, of course, but it is enough to illustrate how diverse and developing toys are ordinary wooden blocks.

It is also worth remembering that fun must be fun for the child, so that she can also be a student. Forcing anything usually brings the opposite effect to the expected ones. So let's just show children the possibilities that pads give. Do not force them into any particular game if they clearly want to do something else.

All the best,
Amousewithahouse