High Maintenance Mom

As another holiday season approaches, I've been thinking about what toys my kids continue to use and what toys break during the holiday season. If you were to ask one of my children what they want for the holidays you might hear about some super fantastic toy my oldest found on the internet while watching the shows I've banned from tv but he's found on YouTube. Obviously, that's another long story. Many of the things my kids appear to desire break or turn out not to be as much fun as they thought they would be. The toys that seem to last are the ones they can reuse for creative play. They love Legos and anything else they can using for building. Sometimes the creations are a simple ship whereas other times they are elaborate habitats for their plastic animals. Below is a selection of toys that not only encourage creative play but are also kid approved and can be used over and over...

Magnatiles

My kids were first introduced to magnatiles at preschool, I think before they turned one. Magnatiles are amazing. Kids can building large structures and there is something very satisfying about having the pieces snap together magnetically. It's fun to watch kids work out basic geometry as they try to use the triangular pieces. From what I can tell, you can not have too many magnatiles.

Citiblocs

There are hundreds of block sets out there and there is a lot of research about how great building sets are for developing early mathematical skills. Choosing one set out of all of the choices is difficult but this is a great set because of the size, shape, and weight of the blocks. A review on Amazon says they are essentially the same as Kapla but at a much better price.

If you want more specialized blocks, we have several friends who love the HABA Castle sets.

ZOOB

ZOOB is a building system with 5 pieces that can snap together 20 ways. The image at the top of the page of the scorpion was formed with ZOOB. Once the pieces are together, they can be moved or flexed. There are countless designs that can be created with ZOOB, see the ZOOB gallery for examples based on the pieces for each set. "ZOOB’s shape is inspired by the nucleotides (the basic structural units of nucleic acids) that make up DNA." (from the Infinitoy website)

We recently saw a presentation by Hayes Raffle, who helped design ZOOB. As part of the design process he watched kids play with their ZOOB creations and realized that kids wanted to make their animals move. While at the MIT Media Lab, Hayes created a robotic building system, called Topobo, that would allow kids to learn how animals move by recording the movements they make with the pieces. Kids of all ages can learn from Topobo, which is just now available for purchase.

Legos

I couldn't mention building toys without Legos. My kids play with Legos almost every day. We have a big bin in each room and often lots of Lego on the floor. There are hundreds of Lego sets available. This year our five year-old has moved from Duplo to "real" Lego. My oldest sometimes counts the number of pieces of his creations and assigns prices to the new set he made. He also spends a lot of time online "researching" Lego sets so he has a general understanding of the set pricing.

Zometool

Zometool is another amazing building set that allows kids to explore shapes. At a recent get together my kids had a blast playing with a friend's set. They built large stars while other kids worked on an elevator shaft with elevator - we also had a lot of rubber bands for holding the elevator in place. The Zometool website has tutorials and models for building geometric shapes and there are special kits for building different chemical compounds. "Each connector node has 62 holes: 12 are pentagonal (red & green), 20 triangular (yellow) and 30 rectangular (blue)" (from Zometool website).

I wish I had known about Zometool and ZOOB earlier so we could have started collections. There are a lot of interesting educational projects you can do with all of the creative play building tools and I look forward to seeing what my kids come up with next.