#Lego blocks for toddlers series#

How can we encourage beneficial block play? Even more impressively, children who practice more complex building skills using blocks and Lego bricks from a young age achieve at higher levels in math into their high school years. Blocks are known to build central knowledge beginning as early as infancy with the concepts of object permanence and basic hand-eye coordination.īy preschool, children who play with blocks have more refined visual-spatial skills and more varied and creative approaches to problem-solving than their peers who don’t.

The consistency with which blocks have been offered as both toy and tool hasn’t wavered, in large part due to their proven ability to build important skills. Indeed, blocks have earned their place as both endless entertainment and timeless education tools, landing in the modern toyscape with multiple inductions into the National Toy Hall of Fame and as much staying power as they held in 1693.

#Lego blocks for toddlers series#

In the early 19th century, when Friedrich Froebel founded the first formal kindergarten, he included in his curriculum a series of educational toys known as the Froebel Gifts, comprised almost entirely of blocks. The value of blocks as both a toy and a learning tool has been recognized since the 17th century, when philosopher John Locke referred to “dice.with letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing,” presumably documenting the use of the now ubiquitous alphabet blocks for the very first time. partnered with Circuit Cubes because they know play and learning go hand in hand. I suppose age knows no boundaries when it comes to playing with blocks. With each toy, we’d followed their lead in starting the play, but then found ourselves perfecting our creations long after the kids had moved on to something else. It had happened early on with their set of perfectly nesting cardboard boxes, then again with their smooth wooden blocks, and yet another time with their Magnatiles. This wasn’t the first time we’d found ourselves fully involved in our kids’ toys, either. The truth was, there was something immensely satisfying and even cathartic about playing with Lego bricks again. Weeks later, as we tagged out in our rotation between roles as lead Lego set builder and lead defense line against our resident four-year-old, my husband smiled and whispered, “I kind of like this.” My husband and I exchanged tired glances and spent the better part of the next week making excuses for why it wasn’t a good time to open the box. 'Something as simple as making sure kids have exposure to block play would set them up for a future where they can build the right kinds of skills for whatever field they want to go into, and they won't be restricted because of their lack of early experience.My six-year-old recently returned from a birthday outing with his grandparents, proud to show us his fresh-off-the-shelves 1,003-piece Lego set, prominently labeled AGES 9-14. 'If you want to build future STEM enthusiasts, you need to start with fundamental skills and they need to come early,' Shelton says.

She's certain that spatial skills learned through block play could soon be recognized as a factor in training tomorrow's scientists, mathematicians, tech professionals, and engineers. Then she'll connect these spatial skills to the children's academic profile, cognitive skills, and school performance to see if there are any correlations. Now Shelton, who has a young son and has stepped on a Lego or two herself, is working to quantify how these master builders create so she can develop a language of block building and determine how these building skills can be learned through training. So far, they've discovered that kids with lots of block experience-so-called 'master builders'-were deliberate in their movements and generally built structures from the bottom up. Using electronic devices, investigators track the movement of Lego bricks as they observe how the children build. In one, young children are given a Lego structure and asked to build a similar structure. Shelton and her colleagues have several block play studies underway in the CTY Research Lab. 'These skills not only have a relationship to academics, but to the fields you might gravitate to, and where you're going to excel.' 'When kids are building with blocks and Legos, they're using spatial reasoning skills,' says Amy Shelton, a cognitive psychologist and director of research at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. These favorite toys are helping your kid achieve in school and beyond. Those Lego bricks and wooden blocks littering your floor aren't just pain-inducing clutter.