Toy Fire Trucks

Wooden puzzles are available in a huge variety of scenes and age related levels, from the basic ABC and 123 to 300 or 500 piece floor puzzles for your older children. They even have some of the wooden puzzles with sound to help children learn their letters, numbers and animal sounds!

Do you have a budding artist in the house? Melissa and Dougs arts and craft selection is the best I’ve seen yet. The artist easels are solidly built and sure to take years of “abuse” from over-active artists! They come stand-alone easels or you can purchase the set with all the supplies to get your young one started immediately.

For the little princess or knight in shining armor, Melissa and Doug offer fantastic wooden castles. There are dolls made especially to fit the castle and furniture for even more interactive fun. There are several doll houses available for playtime fun. There are folding doll houses, a Victorian model a huge wooden two-story house. A huge selection of furniture and accessories are available for each room. I wish I was a child again so I could play….maybe I will anyway!

My favorite is the Tree House. It stands about 20″ high and has a pulley systems, working trap door, porch swing, hammock and retractable stairs – all indoors! This is sure to be a hit on any child’s list!

Melissa and Doug have wonderful rattles and push toys for the younger crowd. The “clacker” push toys are my personal favorites. There is a duck, an elephant and even a larger alligator clacker toy

If your youngster likes vehicles as much as my four-year-old grandson does, then they will love the collections available here. Cars, trucks, emergency vehicles, fire engines and even a garbage truck; many in sizes suitable for very young children with all the safety features you could possible wish for. The colors are vibrant and eye catching to make their appeal even more desirable for all ages.
Melissa and Doug also produce a fantastic line of plush animals. These stuffed, bears, dogs, white tigers and other are sure to provide much needed comfort at bedtime and throughout the day. Most of us had, at one time or another, a favorite stuffed animal, and these are no exception. They are cute, safe and above all soft and cuddly!
By:Anne Jamieson

They play at every stage of life, because playing is natural and relaxing – every human loves to play. Playing is the most natural activity that a baby goes through. In fact, one can use the right set of educational toys at the right periods of childhood to see a spurt of growth in intelligence, knowledge, creativity and cognitive powers in the child. These attributes remain ingrained inside the child for the rest of their lives.

Benefits of Playing

Using the right toys would take the art to perfection reaping maximal benefits for your child.

1) Play begins at birth – don’t we all know that? Playing begins naturally and ought to remain natural for the very initial phase of life.

2) The baby’s major activity during the entire babyhood is also play. In fact, babyhood is when a person is at his/her receptive best. If you arm the baby with knowledge and education at this stage of life, then the baby will start learning it and keep growing in quickly terms of knowledge. Babyhood is a golden period of life – dig all the gold that your baby has inside at this phase. Studies suggest that babies exposed to educational toys early enough learn quicker in school and are the better performers, and later they become more mature and effective individuals as adults. In later babyhood and also early childhood, they get deeper into cognitive involvements. They take to games as making songs and rhymes. They start understanding and respecting games with rules over random games. They start understanding that not every game will have an immediate result – some games take more time to produce results compared to others.

3) Childhood is the longest learning phase of a person’s life. Pre-school, early-school childhood and late-school childhood – each of the levels have their own physical, intellectual and social demands. Make sure that you expose the child to the right set of games at each of the stages that balance the development activities of the body and the mind. Each of these stages call for a different set of requirements. Cross-check with your toy vendor that you are getting the toy for the right age group. If in doubt, get clarified. This is about your child’s future, so don’t take chances. The educational toys tuned towards wholesome growth of children at different stages clearly demarcate the appropriate sets of toys for each age group and the nature of growth those toys would propel. As a result, you get to easily understand and monitor that your child is experiencing the right experience of growing up.

4) During adolescence, the young adults still grow in their minds. The intellectual growth part now takes the foremost seat, especially during early adolescence. This is the phase of life where your kid will experience a tremendous shift in their mindsets that involves developing their careers and making choices. If they keep continuing playing deeper intellectual games and relaxing games, then they implicitly keep honing their inherent sharpness and injecting the much-desired peace into their minds. This translates into a great positive in the longer run. Later as young adults, your kids would either go into higher studies or into their own profession. It is the adolescence experience and knowledge that is the most recent one they have, and that is the one with the biggest impact in their mindsets. If you get to inject the right set of educational toys for their play during adolescence, then that would leave a direct impact on their mindset and would reflect in their career choices.

5) And adults play for relaxation till they grow old – a natural form of evolution of a human life.

As you see, play is important, more so for babies in late babyhood right up to kids in their adolescence. The childhood intellect, cognition and knowledge develop with play. Physical and mental growths are balanced. This can shape up the entire career and life of your kid. Using educational toys with proper discipline thus becomes critical.

As a parent, you would help the child a lot by exposing your children to a set of toys that will make their lives fun and will also help take them forward in their lives. Make your child play, and one day you shall enjoy that you had brought your child in a new world of wonderful colors and flavors.
By:Judy Hansen
About the Author:
The author is a mother of 2 young kids. Her kids simply love wooden educational toys from Melissa and Doug Toys. She is also an advocate for teaching babies how to read and had much success for her own children at a very young age.