Wooden Toys & Games
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16 products
Games and teaching materials, not toys in general
Everything in this collection is made by Igroteco, a Ukrainian manufacturer working in solid wood – painted with water-based colour or left bare. The range splits into two halves that behave quite differently, and it is worth knowing which you are looking at.
One half is games: dominoes, mahjong, sudoku, a balancing tower. The other is teaching material – Cuisenaire rods, Dienes logic blocks, an abacus, counting sets. The second group looks like toys and is not; it is what primary classrooms have used for seventy years.
What are Cuisenaire rods and Dienes blocks?
Two of these are not generic products. The counting rods are the Cuisenaire system, devised by the Belgian teacher Georges Cuisenaire and in classroom use since the 1950s: fifty-six rods in graded lengths, each length its own colour, so that number relationships can be handled before they are named.
The logic blocks are Dienes blocks, from the Hungarian mathematician Zoltán Dienes: forty-eight shapes varying in form, colour, size and thickness, no two alike. Sorting them is set theory before anyone calls it that.
If a teacher has asked for either by name, this is what they meant.
Why wood rather than plastic?
Weight, mostly. A plastic counting rod slides when a child lays another beside it; a wooden one stays put, and lining pieces up accurately is the exercise. A plastic block tower falls under its own lightness. Wooden tiles stack; card ones bend.
The pieces are also untreated or finished in water-based paint, with no varnish, which matters at the age when things go in mouths.
Which set for which age?
The range runs from two to fourteen, and the markings mean something. At two the sets are large solid blocks and an abacus with 3 cm beads. At three the task cards appear and the sets become exercises with a right answer. At fourteen there is one product, the balance tower, and that is a family game rather than a child's one.
Each product page carries its own age and the number of pieces.
What are the task cards for?
Most sets here come with ten double-sided cards and twenty graded tasks. That is what separates them from a bag of blocks: the same pieces work as free play and as structured work, and the cards give a parent something to do with the set rather than leaving it on the floor.
The tasks progress rather than repeating. A set bought at three is still being used at six.
What are they made of?
Solid wood, water-based paint where there is colour, and an instruction booklet in every set. Made in Ukraine. Nothing here needs batteries, and nothing makes a noise.