About Us — About Maple Oatmeal Wooden Blocks
We make the best wooden blocks in the world for your children to play, build, learn, and imagine.
What can you build with Maple Oatmeal Wooden Blocks?
Healthy kids, healthy families, healthy communities, and healthy imagination.
With our wooden blocks, we're building the imagination of young children so that they can be active, creative problem-solvers as they grow toward adulthood. Blocks are about more than building. They are proxies – tools – for dramatic play, through which children can explore and develop their own understandings of our physical and social world.
Principles of Wooden Block Play
- Creative, dramatic play should be a part of every child’s day, and every child’s school day.
- Natural, flexible toys that do not have a predefine story support healthy and imaginative play.
- Safe, durable wooden blocks are the most affordable and flexible dramatic play tool available to children, schools, and families.
- Although wooden blocks inherently teach math, geometry, physics, and the principles of architecture, the reason we provide wooden blocks to children is so that they can create and recreate their understanding of the world through pretend play.
- Teaching children to respect their blocks helps children to respect the world around them. Wooden blocks are not for throwing, hitting, or knocking down.
- Parents and teachers should support young children by providing language and conversation to help them express what they are doing through block play.
- Children who are supported in their play with engaged teachers and parents and with sufficient materials for exploring their ideas become positive problem-solvers as adults.
- We believe that providing wooden blocks to infants, toddlers, preschooler, school children, and their adults will make the world a better place.
Standard Unit Wooden Blocks inherently teach every subject matter.
Although blocks have a fixed size and relationship to other blocks, teachers and parents will tell you that there are no limits to how young minds can play, create, imagine, and discover with a good set of unit blocks.
Wooden blocks set with blocks large and small help children develop gross and fine motor skills. Unit blocks are tools for building stories, developing language and conversational skills, confidence, and social competence through micro and macro dramatic play and through the simple act of giving words to describe what have been built.
Standard Unit Wooden Blocks teach proportions and math through hands-on, intuitive, self-correcting exploration.
Standard Unit Wooden Blocks encourage imagination, planning, experimentation, and problem solving. There is no one right way to play with unit blocks.
We hope you’ll spread the word about Maple Oatmeal Wooden Blocks to your friends and family.
We use Hard Maple to make the safest wooden blocks for little hands and mouths.
Hard Rock Maple, Hard Maple, Sugar Maple, Acer saccharum, is the same tree used to produce Maple Syrup, which is recommended for allergy avoidance diets. Allergies to maple syrup, the concentrated sap, are extremely rare. Allergies to maple wood are virtually unknown. Compared with birch and walnut, hard maple is the safest domestic hardwood for infants and is the wood of choice for infant teethers. Maple wood is naturally anti-microbial, anti-fungal, and insect resistant without being toxic to children. The tight grain and hardness of hard maple make it the preferred wood for preschool equipment as well.
All wooden blocks are NOT the same. Rubberwood and other Asian hardwoods used in toys and furniture are not naturally mold and insect resistant, so those softer "hardwoods" are routinely treated with chemicals after harvesting to prevent mold and insect damage. The most common family of chemicals used to treat rubberwood and other southeast asian hardwoods is recognized by the European Union to be carcinogenic. Although the final products look good on the shelf, we don’t believe this wood is appropriate for children.
We also do NOT recommend foam blocks, cardboard blocks, or plastic unit blocks. In addition to any health concerns, their light weight makes them easy to knock down accidentally. You don't want your child's block play to be frustrating.
We use Hard Maple that has been certified as FSC® Hard Maple.
We choose North American Hard Maple that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.
The FSC® certification means it was from a source that was certified prior to harvesting by FSC®-certified loggers and sold through an FSC®-certified supply chain.
Featured Standard Unit Blocks: Maple Oatmeal Wooden Blocks
We recommend these wooden blocks for children of all ages.
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