Kids Toy Blocks
the building blocks of life

Kid toy blocks are fantastic abstract toys and are one of the most common toys in most families.

Play with toy blocks is a doorway to learning the language of maths, technology, engineering, design, architecture and science.

How Children Play with Wooden Blocks

There are various forms of kids blocks play, dependent largely on the child's age.

• Young children tend to just carry blocks.


• As your child develops, they make rows, either horizontal (on the floor) or vertical. They also enjoy loading blocks into cartons, dumping them out, carrying them, and fitting them carefully back on the shelves.


• Children don't use wooden blocks intentionally for construction until after this stage, when they begin to experiment with balance, enclosure, patterns, and symmetry.


• Usually their first engineering creation is a bridge structure made by using two wooden blocks to support a third and following this, an enclosure, in which they place blocks to enclose a space.


• At their highest level of play, your child uses wooden blocks to represent actual structures, like cars, planes and houses and they also combine blocks with animals and vehicles in pretend play.

Skill Development through Toy Block Play

Block play offers a wide learning exposure across exploration, imitation, spatial problem solving, sorting, comparing, and pretending. In toys blocks play your child develops:

• Fine motor skills through lifting, stacking and balancing blocks


• Math concepts in length, volume and units and fractions, and your child gains exposure to likenesses and differences of shapes, counting, sizes, and amounts and learns about three-dimensionality and about self in space.
  This happens by activities such as placing blocks end to end, building a line or stack of blocks or building a sequence of block patterns.


• Your child will explore the fit and relationships between unit blocks dependent of their size and shape.


• Block play develops your child's ability to mentally visualize relationships - patterns, geometric shapes, part to whole relationships, fractions, adding, dividing, subtracting are all experienced and practiced naturally in the process of building, as is the process of measuring lengths, widths, and heights by eye.


• As your child experiments further with blocks, your child learns enters the area of science, learning about physical laws, about balance and gravity such as by placing blocks on top of each other to make a steady building until they topple.


• Building with wooden blocks allows your child to explore problem solving in a physical manner - this occurs when their bridge falls or building crumbles.
  They build again and each time begin to understand a little more about what is happening - it is this action solving process which leads them to finally be able to determine which block is needed next time for the bridge to stay up. Now that your child has mastered balance and steadiness they can turn their skills to enhancing aesthetics of their structure.

Be aware when buying kids blocks

Things to watch out for when buying wooden blocks include:

1. Look out for wooden block sets that contain as many as you can find of the following: base unit block, doubles, quadruples, halves, triangles, ramps, cylinders, and arches.


2. Wooden blocks help your child explore maths. Make sure your sets of blocks match - that is the small fit to the medium and large in terms of dimensions and proportions.


3. Be aware that poorly made blocks are frustrating for children to build with.


4. When buying wooden toys think about where they are manufactured. Resins, sprays, glues, nails, staples and paints may be in or on wooden toys. Be sure your toys are safe to go into little mouths, as that's where they'll end up for a few years.


5. Have enough blocks on hand. There's nothing more frustrating to your child than not being able to complete the designs they have in mind.