Easy Wooden Toys to Make: Wood & Wire Maze

Build a toy maze using these easy-to-make instructions to create a homemade toy your children will love.

By The Mother Earth News Editors
Updated on December 5, 2024
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by Adobestock/Ксения Мнасина

Building wood toys is a classic hobby. This step-by-step wood and wire maze design builds easy wooden toys to make for gifts.

How to Build A Toy Maze

Toward the end of the first year of life, a child climbs up on two feet and achieves real mobility. Whole new worlds become open to explore. Stairs develop a magnetic attraction. Drawers and kitchen cabinets offer breathtaking gymnastic possibilities. Soon, though, curiosity overwhelms the singular thrill of movement, and the utterly fascinating objects that lie at the top of those stairs, inside those drawers and behind those cabinet doors attract attention.

Efforts to master fine motor skills mark a major phase in a child’s development. Between the first and second years, interest in small objects comes to absorb as much as 20 percent of a youngster’s waking hours. At this age, visual acuity is refined, but manual dexterity lags behind. Thus, organizing play for children one to two years old requires a careful balance between encouraging curiosity and avoiding frustration.

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First comes the ability to move an object to a desired location. Then the child shifts the item’s orientation for inspection. In short order, he or she will learn to manipulate small articles by moving fingers independently of one another. And by the end of the phase–at 24 to 36 months–most children can produce a continual rotating motion to unthread a screw.

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