Green Options

I am so excited to have found a non-leaching, safe sippy cup made by Klean Kanteen , the stainless steel alternative to plastic. Klean Kanteen makes the best stainless steel water bottles. They are odor free and do not taste like metal. We have tried other stainless steel bottles that smell horribly and are lined with epoxy. Plastic/polycarbonate bottles leach bisphenol-A (BPA), a chemical that mimics the hormone estrogen, and can [...]

Thank you Melissa and Doug for saving us from those plastic magnetic refrigerator letters. These wooden magnetic letters are great. The entire back of each letter is covered in one solid magnet, unlike the little chokeable pieces of magnets that always fall out of the plastic kind. Melissa and Doug’s wooden letters consist of 52 letters, including both upper and lower case letters. In my experience as an early childhood educator, [...]

Melissa and Doug/Lights, Camera, Interaction! make several wooden bed jewelry sets. These sets come with everything you need to make great jewelry. The hole size in the beads is large enough for little hands, and beading is great for buiding fine motor control. The alphabet beads are great for learning to spell your name, gifts, and other projects. My daughter made a garland for our live Christmas tree by stringing madrone berries we had collected [...]

This is an all time favorite toy in our home! Both of my children love to play with these blocks. My daughter builds high towers using the largest block as the foundation all the way up to the tiniest block. My son loves to place the blocks within each other in the correct order, which is a tidy way of storing them nested together. The farm [...]

Many theories on early childhood education promote children’s natural curiousity to discover mathematical concepts. Given manipulatives, children naturally experiment, hypothesize, and build their own theories. An abacus is a great toy for building such knowledge, and Melissa and Doug make an affordable wooden one of high quality. Many other kinds of manipulatives, like marbles, get lost around the house. I like that the counters are securely attached to the abacus making clean up an ease. On [...]

Melissa and Doug’s Band in a Box is a combination of six musical instruments made from wood and metal. The instruments come in a wooden crate for storage. I love the wooden crates Melissa and Doug toys come in! These crates are sturdy and serve as packaging for the product and storage at home too. The amount of packaging for most toys is overwhelming, with every little part zip tied to a greater piece of cardboard [...]

The Melissa and Doug Giant Plush Unicorn fulfills the dreams of any child enchanted with the magical world. My five-year-old daughter opened this gift from her grandmother on the morning of Christmas Eve. The entire day was spent in the world of imagination, in which the unicorn protected her from the darkness in the world. I was amazed at the complexity and length of her dramatic play. Perhaps the play was [...]