Collection: Schleich Wild Life

Wild Life covers the animals most children meet first through play: lions, elephants, deer, peacocks, and plenty they'll only discover here. Every figure is hand-painted and modelled on the real animal, right down to the pattern on a peacock's tail or the exact stance of a stalking wolf.

It's a big collection, which is part of the point. A single lion is a nice gift; a shelf of safari, forest and jungle animals is a proper collection a child keeps adding to, one species at a time. Most figures suit ages 3 and up and are built to be handled daily rather than kept behind glass.

Because the collection is so wide, it's worth thinking about it in loose groups rather than one undifferentiated pile of animals: African savannah animals, European forest animals, and further afield species that a child might not otherwise come across outside a book.