Guide to Choose the Right
Wooden Building Block And Other Toy Blocks for Toddlers

Ideal toy building blocks for tots.

Very young toddlers (between 12-15 months) will love soft blocks -- which are similar to baby building blocks. They of course will be able to stack the soft blocks more readily than the babies will.

At around 15 months, your toddler should be ready for a smaller wooden building block which is often cube-shaped. These wooden blocks are usually called wooden alphabet block or abc wooden blocks since they have printed on them. In addition, there are also wooden building blocks which have numbers on them, so you can use these two types of wooden blocks to introduce alphabets and numbers.

I highly recommend you to get the wooden toy blocks instead of the plastic ones, even if they are more expensive compared to the plastic ones. I found that the plastic ones are just not up to expectation. Not only they are too light, but also some of them have non-even surfaces which make them hard to stack. Plastic building blocks, in my opinion, will only frustate your tots and a complete waste of money.

Wooden building blocks, in contrary are heavier and have smooth surface. They are easy to stack and durable. Just don't let your puppy to come near to any of your child's wooden blocks or they will be chewed. That's how my precious wooden building blocks were destroyed, anyway.

Your tots should find stacking the cube-shaped abc wooden blocks easy. And as they grow older, they should be able to make a kind of 'building' out of the toy building blocks, instead of just stacking them up to make a tower. At this stage, you will need to buy child wooden blocks with different kinds of shape. Again, you should give them chunky pieces since toddlers still cannot handle small pieces.

At this stage, you have two choices. You can get either wooden building blocks, or foam building blocks for your toddler. Although less durable than the wooden ones, foam building blocks are less noisy and won't hurt anybody if they are thrown around.

Block play for toddlers.

Depending on your tots, they may or may not be ready for an advance block play. Don't be discouraged if she only want to stack and does not actually 'build' something using toy building blocks. Your toddler can also use toy building blocks for block plays which do not involve building.

Here are some suggestion for block plays which do not involve building:

• Use wooden alphabet blocks and number blocks for introducing your kid to alphabets and numbers, respectively. Introduce only one or two number at a time. You can do these following block plays for introducing alphabet or numbers:
  • ask your child to choose between two numbers (ex. which one is number one, which one is number two. etc)
  • ask her to give you a particular number (ex. give me a five, give me a two).
  • hunting for numbers/alphabets around the house, where you will hide those wooden building blocks and ask your child to find a particular number.
  • put some wooden blocks into a box filled with small foam packing nuts.. Then ask your toddler to find the number blocks or abc wooden blocks in the box and tell the number/alphabet printed on it.
• Fill and dump activities. Your child can fill her wagon with wooden toy blocks, move them somewhere, and dump the blocks.
• Bowling. Make a tower out of the child wooden blocks. Then roll a ball towards the tower until it hits the tower and knock it down.
• Pretend play activities.

So you see, there are many use of wooden building block. They are indeed toys with good value. Therefore, toy building blocks should be part of your child's childhood.

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