Natural Educational Toddler Toys That Make Great Gifts!

Young children will love this list of the best natural and eco-friendly toddler toys. This eco-conscious toy guide is filled with great gifts for toddlers. It includes Waldorf and Montessori educational toys for toddlers that make learning fun!

This list of toddler toys is filled with some of the best natural educational toys for toddlers. Eco-friendly toddler toys made of wood, and other sustainable materials, provide many benefits to the developing child.

The eco-conscious toys included on this list make great toddler gift ideas for Christmas, or, a birthday. Give your growing child the gift of a more sustainable future with the very best natural toddler toys!

Best Toddler Toys: Waldorf and Montessori Educational Toys for Toddlers

During the time that my husband and I owned and operated a Waldorf-inspired childcare, we were determined to stay away from conventional plastic toddler toys, and electronic toys that made too much noise.

Instead, we looked for natural educational toys for toddlers that are made with organic, natural, or eco-friendly materials. As you can see, we found a plethora of sustainable green toys to choose from that met the many developing needs of the toddlers in our home daycare.

Our family is particularly fond of natural Waldorf, Montessori, and Reggio Emilia inspired toys… Which are some of the best natural wooden toddler toys available today. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

Related: Best Tools for Raising Helpers

How to Natural Toddler Toys Benefit Development?

Toddler toys made with wood and other natural materials benefit the developing toddler in several ways.

Playing with natural toddler toys made with wood, wool, silk, and other natural materials provide a rich sensory experience for the developing child. This is why they are used in both Waldorf and Montessori Education.

Natural toys also provide a more open-ended play experience for the developing toddler. This can help young children develop their creativity and imagination. More details that describe how each type of toddler toy benefits development can be found in the toy descriptions below.

Click on the title of each toddler toy to learn more about it. If you click to purchase, Rhythms of Play will earn a small commission at no cost to you.

Educational Toddler Toys: Games and Puzzles for Toddlers

Games are a great way to learn through play. Working with puzzles can help toddlers develop their hand-eye coordination, finger dexterity, concentration, spatial ability, and problem-solving skills.

Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles for Toddlers

The wooden toddler puzzle set listed above comes with 6 jigsaw puzzles. A few more wooden jigsaw puzzle sets for toddlers are listed below.

Hape – Colorback Sea Turtle

Use the wand (with safe, breakaway cord) to guide each colored marble into the sea turtle’s matching section of the shell. This quiet and wonderful travel toy builds coordination and concentration while reinforcing color recognition.

We keep this fun toddler toy in our car. It is fantastic for travel because the pieces are contained. I’m amazed at how deeply my daughter can focus while playing with this toy.

Plan Toys Wooden Animal Memory Game

This wooden memory game for toddlers consists of 24 wooden pictures tiles with 12 different kinds of animals. Test children’s memory and find the most animal pair to successfully win the game. Great for 2-4 players.

Related: DIY Nature Memory Game

Magnetic Pattern Blocks Set

Pattern blocks help develop a toddler’s creativity, imagination, color recognition, hand-eye coordination, and problem-solving skills. Great travel toy for toddlers!

Hape Totally Amazing Roller Derby Wooden Marble Racing Toddler Toy

Ready, set, race with the Roller Derby Track from Hape Toys! Colorful wooden balls, peek-a-boo holes, and fast tracks create this best-selling, dual-sided mountain of fun. Toddlers will love rolling the brightly colored balls down the tracks over and over again!

Musical Toys for Toddlers

Studies show that music is beneficial for critical cognitive development in children. Imagine a thick forest with no clear pathways through it, this is like the developing brain of a child.

Now visualize the pathway being forged, neurologically, every time you musically interact with your child. The “music channel” is similar to the “language channel” in that it needs to be stimulated every day in order to grow and be strong.

Musical Instrument Set

Introduce your toddler to the fun of music through playing their own instruments perfectly sized for little hands to grasp and shake. This beginning musical instrument set for toddlers includes a tambourine, musical triangle, xylophone, handbell, shaker egg, and more. It also comes with a clear handbag that is ideal for storage and clean-up of all the instruments.

Melody Glockenspiel with Mallets

The Melody Glockenspiel with two wooden mallets features a streamlined, child-friendly design with 8 precision tuned bars arranged in a C pentatonic scale to provide pleasing sounds no matter which notes are played.

Toddler Musical Instrument Toy Set with 12 Wooden Percussion Toys

Your toddlers will love this musical set for budding musicians. This 12 pieces wooden musical percussion set contains a shaker egg, a triangle with a striker, finger castanet, sleigh bells, piccolo flute, wrist bells, tambourine, xylophone with wooden mallets and maracas. An ideal gift for a toddler who shows enthusiasm for music.

Green Tones Hohner Spinning Drum

This spinning drum is a lovely beginning musical instrument for your toddler. It features a smooth wood handle shaped for small hands.

Eco-Friendly Planes, Trains, and Automobiles for Toddlers

First Vehicles Set with Wooden Car, Truck, and Airplane

Just right for little hands, this set of three chunky hardwood vehicles with easy-rolling wheels is great for early pretend play.

Green Toys Dump Truck

This dump truck for toddlers may not be made of wood or other natural materials, however, it is made in the USA from 100 percent recycled plastic milk containers–woot!

This award-winning, eco-designed toy truck has no metal axles and a workable dumper that encourages motor skill development. The recycled plastic is very sturdy and will last a very long time.

We love that if it ever breaks beyond repair it can be placed in the recycling bin instead of the garbage can! You may also like the Green Toys Fire Truck!

Wooden Airplane Toy

An Eco-Friendly and handmade wooden toy airplane that is perfect for stimulating creative expression, fine motor, tactile, cognitive and hand or eye development. The easy-to-grasp design helps to improve the pincers grip of your child, for better-grasping abilities to prepare for writing.

More wooden airplanes for toddlers:

Switchback Racetrack

A favorite in our home childcare! Cars jump from track to track on the switchback racetrack as they zoom down the speedway to the finish line.

Two cars can be sent down the track so toddlers and preschool children can race to their heart’s content. Included are two, three-inch-long cars with spiral spinning graphics on their wheels. Or, try the wooden switchback racetrack by Hape.

Magnetic Car Loader Wooden Toy Set With 4 Cars and 1 Semi-Trailer Truck

Toddlers will love playing with this wooden vehicle set. It includes a red truck with a magnetic arm, a car-carrier trailer, and 4 magnetic wooden cars.

The unique colors and numbers on each car inspire counting, sorting, and sequencing. It has a detachable trailer that features stabilizing tracks to keep the cars in place while the truck is in motion.

Wooden Train Set

Encourage your child’s imagination with a wooden train set. Playing with trains can help spur your child’s imagination as they develop their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Give yourself some free time while your child plays for hours!

You may also like this stacking train by Melissa and Doug. (pictured below)

Brio My First Railway Beginner Pack Wooden Toy Train Set

The perfect toy for the creative toddler. Start your budding train engineer off on the right track with this cute railway wooden train set for toddlers. This toddler train set includes a cute train with a special rainbow bridge and ramps for on and off rail play. The track sections are so easy to put together and take apart your toddler can explore different track layouts as they create the railway of their dreams!

Tobo Track

This sweet little car and train set can connect directly to Thomas, Brio, Leggo and other popular sets. It encourages group play, creative thought, manual dexterity, and sharing.

The best thing about this track is the versatility. One piece of Tobo Track can do what several individual pieces of a conventional wood train track can do. Tobo Track can curve left, or curve right, straight or “T.” They are all made the same. This can really stimulate creation because you can make any kind of configuration.

Animal Toys for Toddlers

Grimm’s Natural Wooden Horse on Wheels

This handcrafted horse from Germany is carved from solid wood and moves easily on its 4 wooden wheels. Toddlers will delight in pushing along this wonderful little wooden horse while developing fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.

Older children will love to use this horse creatively for pretend play: On the farm, combined with other toys, or by itself
Have your Horse pull a load by adding one of the compatible Wooden Wagons or Carriages from Grimm’s (sold separately)

Melissa & Doug Fold and Go Wooden Barn with 7 Animal Figures

This two-story wooden barn is stocked with seven realistic plastic farm animals (a horse, cow, pig, sheep, goat, dog, and turkey), so it is not 100% natural. However, it’s wonderful for farm play. Inside, you’ll find everything you need to have dairyland fun!

The folding corral can be moved around and adjusted to any number of shapes. Inside the barn, each animal can get cozy in its own separate stall until it’s time to play again. This wooden barn is great for imaginative play, storytelling, and fine motor skills.

Natural Waldorf Dolls for Toddlers

Waldorf dolls for toddlers are ideal for pretend play and social-emotional development, this is one of the reasons that they have minimal facial features and just a hint of an expression. This allows children to use their imaginations and inner picturing capacities.

A Waldorf doll can easily be imagined to be happy or sad, laughing or crying, unlike more conventional dolls with rigid plastic faces and fixed expressions. This lack of detail makes it possible for toddlers to role-play and act out events that are real or imagined, or project their feelings onto them. They are therefore perfect for both social-emotional development and imaginative play.

Waldorf Doll for Toddlers

These Waldorf dolls for toddlers are available in several styles. They are 11″ tall and made from 100% natural materials of cotton & wool. Their clothing is removable so toddlers can dress them and undress them. The Waldorf doll pictured below is the doll that my daughter has.

Hape Happy Baby Toddler Pocket Dolls

Each of these happy baby dolls for toddlers has unique colors and skin tones. Playing with these little cuties promotes creativity, role-playing, and finger dexterity. They come in a mixed assortment of 12 baby dolls that your toddler will LOVE!

Grimm’s Set of 12 Rainbow Friends

A set filled with 12 adorable little wooden dolls, one for each month of the year! These natural wooden peg dolls are crafted as simple human forms without a lot of detail, so children are encouraged to use their imagination.

Toddlers love to use these wooden dolls for pretend play, counting, color recognition and more! If you are feeling crafty, make your own DIY rainbow peg dolls!

Grimm’s Rainbow of Little Waldorf Dolls in Organic Cotton, Set of 10 Dwarfs without Beards

This set includes 10 Little Dwarfs (without beards), each in a different vibrantly colored outfit. Each doll’s skin and clothing are 100% organic cotton, and each has quartz sand in the base to allow them to stand upright without support. Also available in a Set of Rainbow Dwarfs with beards.

Related: DIY Rainbow Peg Dolls

Best Wooden Building Blocks for Toddlers

Block play is an essential activity for all children to experience from an early age. Building blocks for toddlers can promote the development of motor skills, color and shape perception, problem-solving, creativity, color/shape perception, spatial awareness, and the beginnings of logical thought.

More building block recommendations can be found in our roundup of natural baby toys, and preschool toys.

Grimm’s Tree Slices: First Wooden Building Blocks for Toddlers

This set of wooden building blocks for toddlers is simple, unique, and beautiful. The chunky “tree” blocks are made from natural tree branches in a variety of widths and lengths that are perfectly sized for small hands. This set also includes a cotton mesh storage bag to make it an easy travel toy for toddlers.

Uncle Goose Nursery Rhyme Wooden Blocks for Toddlers

Teach toddlers classic storytelling skills with this 28 block set. Each block comes embossed with two iconic images from classic Mother Goose stories. Read the playful text for each rhyme on the four other sides in our original, artful font.

Uncle Goose ALPHABET ABC Building Blocks

Toddlers Love these blocks! These beautiful blocks made in the USA help toddlers learn the alphabet. Toddlers can learn their ABCs while they sequence, stack; sort, build and match.

Personalized Standard Wooden Building Blocks

This personalized wooden block set contains natural finished, smooth-sanded hardwood blocks to inspire hands-on, imaginative play. It is packaged in a handsome, wooden tray for easy storage.

Standard building blocks are ideal for introducing early pre-math concepts, including shapes, parts-to-whole, and sorting.

Nesting Blocks for Toddlers

Petit Collage Nesting Blocks, Woodlands ABC

Learn your ABCs and numbers with these nesting and stacking blocks for toddlers that measure almost 3 feet tall. Toddlers love to stack these nesting blocks up and knock them down over and over again!

We love to stack boxes similar to these and use them with dolls and animal toys as shown in the photo below with our DIY Rainbow Peg Dolls. The baby in the wooden peg doll set is a bit too small for toddlers. Take it out and place it back in the set once children reach preschool age.

Wooden Push and Pull Toys for Toddlers

Once your toddler begins to walk push and pull toys are a must-have. Developmentally, using a pull toy is more complicated for toddlers than using a push toy.

Instead of just looking and moving forward, your child has to hold her arm back and look back to make sure her toy is still there. Meanwhile, she’ll also be moving forward and looking for a clear route.

This is why we recommend starting with push toys. Introduce pull toys and ride-on toys once your toddler has mastered push toys. Our favorite push and pull toys for toddlers are listed below.

We have included a few more push and pull toys that you may also like in our natural baby toy roundup.

PlanToys Plan Preschool Walk N Roll, Push and Pull

While the wheel turns, the wooden ball inside hits the panels and creates a lovely sound not nearly as annoying as the popper I used as a child!

Do you remember those popping push toys with the colored balls in the clear plastic dome? Pop, pop, pop, pop! Drove my mother crazy, that’s why we never had one for long–lol!

I actually enjoy listening to the children in my home daycare push and pull this one around because its soft melody lets me know where they are. You know how those toddlers can wander off!

I also love that this toy can be anything your child imagines it to be as they grow and develop. We’ve seen the kids vacuum the house, mows the lawn, and even ride a song horse–haha!

Walk-A-Long Puppy

This toddler pull toy, like most of the toddler toys described in this post, has the potential for many years of use unlike much of the competition. Toddlers will not only enjoy taking this friendly puppy for walks–it will also eventually encourage imitative and imaginary play, and promote fantasy storytelling, role-playing, and creativity.

Uncle Goose Classic ABC Blocks with Pull Wagon – Made in the USA

This set of 28 wooden blocks features carved letters with fancy scroll borders and simple non-toxic ink drawings. Each individual block features four sides with different colored letters. One side has a number, one side has a picture and spelling of the object below it, such as an owl or duck.

Children love to stack these, build with them, combine them with other blocks, and find ways to use them in all sorts of other creative ways. In our home childcare, they have been food, money, phones, you name it!

Best Eco-Friendly Ride on Toys for Toddlers

Little Red Rider Wooden Kid’s Ride on Bike

Your new little walker will discover many ways to build confidence and stability with this little red rider wooden wagon. Four-wheel drive makes this foot-powered rider stable and easy for toddlers to use.

Scoot Around Ride-on Wood Bike for Toddlers

The perfect scooter for a 1-3-year-old toddler girl or boy. A four-wheel drive takes on a whole new meaning with this best-selling, foot-powered ride. The good news is that this scooter’s rubber wheels won’t leave marks on the floors when your youngster goes for a spin in the house.

This ride-on scooter for toddlers is great for developing muscle strength and balance. Encourage lots of short rides so your child can develop muscle strength and balance, and increase the wheel time and distance as your child gains more power and confidence.

A natural toddler toy that is perfect for older babies and toddlers that are beginning to test their mobility and develop active motor skills. We found it to be an easy transport toy for trips to the park, around the home, and more.

Wishbone 3 in 1 Original Bike (12 months +)

Unlike any other running bikes, the Wishbone bike evolves with a child’s different stages of development. It starts at age 1 as a trike and converts to a running bike as the child grows. With its environmentally sustainable design and innovative 3-bikes-in-1 feature, it is the ultimate pre-bike for toddlers.

Toddler Table and Chair

Hape Early Explorer Play Station and Stool Set

This kid-sized wooden table and stool create a perfect place for playing, working or snacking. Keep art supplies in the seat so everything is close at hand when you need it. Shelving on each side is great for storing coloring books, pads of paper or works of art!

Kitchen Helper Stool for Toddlers

Toddler Kitchen Helper Stool

If you like your toddler near you when you work in the kitchen, or your toddler must be near you at all times, you will love this kitchen helper stool for Toddlers. Young children learn by watching us work. Learn more about raising helpers in How to Raise a Helper!

Best Art Supplies for Toddlers

Head over to have a look at our list of the best art supplies for kids and why a young artist should use them. Most of the art materials make excellent stocking stuffers for Christmas.

If I was to purchase only one art supply for my toddler, it would be these amazing beeswax block crayons. Once you experience the smooth consistency and vibrant colors of these 100% beeswax crayons you will never turn back!

Related: Tools for Raising Helpers

Best Gifts for Toddlers: Natural Toddler Toys That Children Will LOVE

Natural toddler toys provide a rich sensory experience for the developing child and can promote imaginative play. This toddler gift guide contains natural toddler toys recommended by Waldorf and Montessori educators.

Provide your growing child with the gift of a more sustainable future with natural toys for toddlers!

Don’t forget to have a look at the Rhythms of Play Store and our family gift guide with readymade and homemade gift ideas for the whole family!

Learn more about Rhythms of Play HERE!

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Comments

menucha says

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We have the Wishbone Bike recycled edition and it’s super cool!Haven’t tried the original but I’ve heard it’s wonderful.

Kat says

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Great list of natural toddler toys, Thank you! I’ve been having trouble finding wooden toys for my child. This is very helpful.

Tori says

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Thank you for this guide! This was great. It’s hard to find this info! Thank you for compiling.

- Nell Regan M.A. says
  
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  You’re welcome, Tori!
  
  We had a hard time finding the best natural and eco-friendly toddler toys for my daughter when she was a baby, so I figured I’d put this together for everyone else looking for the best of the best.
  
  So glad you found this list of toddler toys useful!
  
  Nell