Your first thought when you think of wooden toys, will probably be of the building blocks you may have played with when you were young. They typically come in sets of either colored or natural blocks with pieces shaped as squares, rectangles and more unusually arches and triangles. They offer kids hours of imagination playtime where the skyscrapers are the limit when it comes to the designs they will have to come up with.

These days wooden toys come in many more forms than just building blocks and one company is leading the way when it comes to having a huge range of varied toys – they are Melissa and Doug. This now hugely popular wooden toy company started life as a small home business with one wooden cut out puzzle toy. Now they have dozens of educational toys to their name, mostly made from wood. Each toy helps teach pre-school basics in a fun way, such as numbers, letters, shapes and colors, or aims to offer practice for motor skills and role play.

A popular arts and crafts toy is the childrens’ easel. It is just the right height for your little one and holds large pads of paper and paints or drawing materials. It is a great quality piece of kit for your budding artists.

Featuring prominently in the wooden toy range are the various themed wooden puzzles. They are more cut out puzzles than jigaw types and each piece comes with a handy little child sized knob for easy placement. Melissa & Doug, of course, still make the building block toys, in fact offering some of the best quality on the market. The hardwood is very durable and the paint does not chip easily. Other popular wooden toys are in the play kitchen line as well as old boys toys favourites such as wooden trains and other vehicles.

Melissa and Doug wooden toys cover the whole age range from baby to toddler to older child, where items such as puppet theatres are available. Families can have great fun together with this wide range of wooden toys and can avoid the worries associated with the recall of many modern toys.