How to make a material for glossy Wood To start off I'd like to learn how to model a wooden rectangle. 

I know how to manipulate the object and get the shape I want but I really don't know how to get the texture of wood. The look I'm hoping to achieve is a wood that has a glossy finish over it. Maybe I'm taking the complete incorrect approach to this, but as of now I have a simple rectangle and am very open to suggestions!

(The following is an explanation on what I'm doing if you're curious)
I was given the opportunity to make an animation for a school, and am starting to just now get into animation and graphic design and need some help starting this.

I've been using the Blender to make things like HD animations by making a 'cartoony' looking fire affect rolling off of letters. I now would like to have a wooden background and have a fire carve the kids names into the wood.
If your final project is destined to be for Blender's Game Engine, you're really jumping in at the deep end.  If it's just to create an on-screen demo 'live' whilst still in Blender, or producing a video for each name, you've still got a long way to go if starting from scratch.

With the latter in mind and your query as to how to make wood shiny, I've included this example with some text 'burnt/engraved' into it's front surface to at least show you what is possible using plain vanilla Blender and OpenGL rendering.



The 'shinyness' such as it is, was achieved by placing a few 'Point lights' about and upping the specular setting.

The Blend file (complete with textures) is attached so you can wander within and see how it's put together, experiment etc.  Something to kick off from.

Making the oblong look like wood needs "Texturing".  Have a look at the Blender file attached along with some YouTube tutorials on the subject.  There's plenty available.

You might also take a look at this: What order to texture a 3d object?

(Blender version used: 2.77a)