ChildTrek Blog

By Miebeth Bustillo-Booth, ChildTrek Founder

Shape Sorters - Important Early Learning Toy
Shape sorters are important educational toys. They help strengthen your child’s fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, develop problem-solving skills, encourage color recognition, and begin to help your toddler understand cause and effect. It’s one of the best early learning toys around.

Plan Toys Shape & Sort It Out: Classic, Effective
If you are around children, you know that shape sorters can be very challenging for toddlers. Some are too gimmicky and complicated.

Plan Toys hits it on the spot with its Shape & Sort It Out. In order to encourage success, Plan Toys stuck with three basic shapes and familiar colors (red, blue, green, yellow). In doing so, it promotes success and confidence through recognition and repetition. It is classically designed and comes with all you need to help your child develop important foundational skills. No frills, no gimmicks. Just a sturdy wooden box, a lid, six wooden shapes (2 of each: square, circle, triangle), and your child sorting things out. It worked when you were a kid, it will work just as well with your little one.

A few features that are worth noting: There are rounded cut-out handles on the sides to help with storage and portability. Unlike its soft counterparts, the wooden cut-out shapes have no give. So there’s no cheating by squeezing or stuffing in the pieces. If your child gets too frustrated, he can lift the lid and put the pieces in that way. This is completely normal and gives the sense of progress. Of course, your toddler will try sorting again and with each satisfying clunk will eventually figure things out.

Plan Toys Shape & Sort It Out is well built. It will withstand years of play and will be ready for the next child’s attempts.

Simply good.

Review by Miebeth Bustillo-Booth, ChildTrek Founder

Here’s the basic issue: Kids like drums. Parents grow not to.  At first, it sounds like such a neat thing to give. Kids and drums. They just go together. But, most are just loud, loud, loud - eventually wearing parental nerves. So what to do? Deny your child the need to merrily pound! Wear earplugs! Seriously though, there are better alternatives, or at least drums that are much easier on the ear than others.

Take, for example, the Plan Toys Wooden Drum. The wooden drum is masterfully cut along the top to produce various notes. The rubberhead drumstick against the wood produces softened and pleasing tones much like dampened bell sounds. It is made of recycled, chemical-free rubberwood and colored with non-toxic water-based dyes. This simple wood toy is one of my personal favorites.

When I show the Plan Toys Drum to parents at the store, most cringe and say something like, “Oh, no. Not a drum!” Then I play along the base. Eyebrows rise and skepticism falls away. The overwhelming majority say something along the line of wow-that-really-does-sound-very-good. Most turn around and buy it. I’ve seen parents play with the drum as if they’ve slipped back to their own childhood.

I know it’s just a toy. But some toys send you back to childhood. This drum is like that. It gives you (err…your child) permission to just be a kid. Yeah, go ahead and pound, pound, pound!

Check out selection of other great wooden toys by Plan Toys.