The Great Book of Wooden Toys is full of over 50 projects for building wooden toys like planes and cars and trucks.

Making Furniture & Dollhouses for American Girl Dolls is a book that teaches you to make dollhouses and furniture for the popular American Girl Dolls or other 18″ dolls.  This can be a great way to build a girl’s interest in woodworking.  The scale is not too delicate for small hands.

A Treehouse is really the ultimate woodworking project for a kid.  It literally involves constructing a space that is THEIRS.  This book makes a great start to the build:  Build Your Own Fantasy Treehouse. Summer is half over, time to get to it.

Zany Wooden Toys That Whiz, Spin, Pop and Fly is a book that has a whole collection of fun action related wooden toys.  The plans are pretty simple and yet there is nothing simple about the cleverness of them.  A lot of fun to read, and even more fun to build.  I find they also inspire creative thinking as kids contemplate merging one design with another.

A common project to build with kids in a woodshop is a bird house or feeder.   Designs can be simple or complex.  Many adults tend to underestimate the project and just wing it.  What I have found is that trying to think and design a project while building it with a child in the shop is harder than it sounds.  There are enough distractions with a child in the shop that it makes it difficult to think about all the subtle nuances of a design.

My suggestion is to either plan and design it before setting foot in the shop, or better yet, let your child shape the design by choosing a pattern from many tried and true birdhouse designs from the book Easy to Build Birdhouses, A Natural Approach.

This book not only does a great job with presenting plans and designs, it also addresses wood and finish choices that are bird safe.  It really is a great book for teaching kids how to take multiple aspects into consideration of a plan.

Here are three woodworking books that are recommended by a woodworker Dad and his toddler son.

from TimberFrame-Tools.com >> Woodworking Books for Toddlers