Are Building Blocks Good for Toddlers?

If you have ever stepped into a toddler room at a childcare center or visited a preschool classroom, one thing that will stick out is the building block center and how many different towers, buildings, and roads are being constructed.

Aside from being fun, building blocks are an excellent way to help toddlers learn and understand spatial awareness, improve fine motor skills, introduce math and engineering, improve hand-eye coordination, and encourage logical thinking.

Wooden blocks, Lincoln Logs, Duplo, Magna Tiles, and Mega Blocks offer hours of play and learning time while maintaining a level of safety with the larger-sized pieces.

LEGO provides various shapes, colors, and sizes to stimulate building fun further, but they are usually better suited for older toddlers starting around age four or five.

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What skills does building blocks develop?

Building blocks are great ways to help toddlers have fun, flourish in personal creativity, socially interact with their peers, and work on developmental skills for their age. Spatial awareness and fine motor skills are put into play when building, stacking, and matching blocks.

Block play and mathematics

Math and engineering skills are used when learning geometric shapes, counting how many blocks are in a tower, and determining where heavy and light blocks are best applied in their creations.

Hand and eye coordination are improved through grabbing, placing, catching, and balancing blocks chosen to assemble their design.

Logical thinking and cognitive skills are applied and enhanced through cause and effect and mental stimulation.

When a child places a larger, heavier, or differently shaped block on top of their tower, they may see it fall over.

This allows the child to logically think through the problem using cause and effect to rebuild their building and see if they can make it even taller.

Building Block for Toddlers

Duplo and Mega Blocks are two brands that can be fundamental to the physical and mental development of a toddler.

The large colorful blocks typically come in sets of 50 to 80 blocks and are reasonably priced.

One set per child is usually enough for the first year of block play, but as a child grows and skills are enhanced, additional sets may be needed.

Some Mega Blocks will come with included stickers to place on the blocks for association pieces such as eyes, mouths, paws, tails, and so on.

Duplo blocks are compatible with other Duplo sets, just as Mega Blocks are also compatible with all different Mega Block sets.

What are the different types of blocks for children?

Lincoln Logs, Melissa & Dough Wooden Blocks, iPlay iLearn Natural Wood Blocks, and wooden Alphabet Blocks are fantastic for stacking and building. Wooden blocks can come in multiple colors or a natural wooden finish.

While Duplo and Mega Blocks connect like LEGOs, most wooden blocks, other than Lincoln Logs, do not have any connecting pieces to secure a tower or building.

All sides of the blocks are flat or have textured grooves such as letters and numbers that are recessed into the block, taking their tower building to the next level.

Toddlers will have fun sorting blocks into colors and shapes and trying to see how tall they can balance blocks on top of each other for a record-breaking tower.

Pattern blocks can be found in sets with boards and shapes or shapes alone.

Both options provide exceptional learning opportunities since the blocks come in multiple forms, such as squares, triangles, octagons, pentagons, circles and rectangles, and colors.

Pattern boards will display pictures of animals, insects, foods, vehicles, seasonal activities such as a kite or shovel and pail, and flowers.

Each image will be made by matching shape blocks to the shapes on the board.

Not only do pattern boards and blocks help with hand-eye coordination, but it also encourages logical thinking and spatial awareness to match the correct shape to the shape on the board.

Magnetic Blocks Toys

Magna Tiles and Magnetic Blocks are fun for all ages, even adults. Each piece can connect to the other through a magnetic connection.

There are triangles, squares, and rectangles that will be solid or have an open center to serve as a window, door, or whatever a child can imagine.

Intock Magnetic Blocks are solid 3D squares geared toward young toddlers still practicing stacking and creating.

Magna Tiles are thin, flat pieces that can be turned into 3D shapes by connecting multiple tiles and building upward and outward. Magnetic blocks can be purchased in sets of fifteen pieces or larger.

What Age are Legos for

LEGO sets will be labeled on the box for the ideal age range for each build. After playing with larger blocks and reaching four to five years old, a toddler may be ready to advance into younger-rated LEGO sets.

There will be fewer pieces in younger-age approved kits than in adult-level building kits, and the elements will be smaller than Duplo or Mega Blocks, but they still provide hours of fun building and bonding time.