Choosing Wood Toys for Your Little Ones

Hi Everyone, Jesse here and I found this great guide for parents on choosing Wood Toys for your son or daughter.  Wood toys offer so many great benefits: durability, quality and safety.  We encourage each of you to visit The Imaginative Child and find the best wood toys on the market today.

Wooden peg puzzles, which are basically wood jigsaw puzzles with pegs or knobs on top of each puzzle pieces, are classic wooden puzzles. They are usually 1-piece puzzles, which mean there is only one piece per picture. One wooden peg puzzle can contain a few puzzle pieces.
For the littlest toddlers - around 12-24 months, get wooden peg puzzles which have pictures on the board which correspond to the pictures at the jigsaw puzzle pieces. This way, your toddler's job is just to match the pictures at the base of the hole with the ones on puzzle pieces, and then put the pieces back in the correct holes.
Hence, wooden peg puzzles are ideal starter puzzles which will enhance your toddler's picture matching ability, as well as fine motor skills.
You can see a decent selection of wooden peg puzzles made by Melissa and Doug here.

Once your toddlers are expert in completing wooden peg puzzles, it's time to move to wooden jigsaw puzzles which will not only challenge your toddler's fine motor skill, but also shape recognition ability and logic.
To increase your toddler's fine motor skills ability you need to get toddler wooden puzzles with no peg. Melissa & Doug makes wooden sound puzzles with no knobs or pegs which are ideal for toddlers this age.
When your toddler is ready for more challenge, get kid wooden puzzles which have no peg and no pictures at the base of the puzzle holes. This way, you challenge your toddler's fine motor skills and at the same time increase your toddler's shape recognition ability.
Magnetic wooden puzzle made by Melissa & Doug can be used to get your toddler to match shape of the hole and puzzle pieces. These magnetic puzzles are also good to enhance your toddler's fine motor skills because your toddlers are expected to take out and put back the magnetic puzzle pieces using either a tow, a bug catcher net or a fishing pole which come with the puzzles.