All children love playing with building blocks. It can be Lego, Mega Blocks, Duplo, Technic or any other brand. Kids do not care about the brand until later on after they learnt how to read the logo on the small bricks or when they get frustrated that the pieces are not 100% compatible with the rest of their building blocks.

If you didn`t spend some floor time with your child playing with building blocks, maybe you should give it a try. It is an investment that will pay off, no doubt about it!

Below you can find 12 reasons why you should encourage your child to play with building blocks.

Building blocks can

• Improve the hand eye coordination.The attractive colours help the hand eye coordination. When kids play with building blocks, they use all their senses.

• Enhance creativity. When kids use their imagination, they come up with some intricate designs. They are turning their fantasies into reality. The unlimited constructive potential of Lego is a solid education tool.

• Develop better fine motor skills. Grasping, grabbing, stacking or anchoring the pieces together enable the children to perform activities that help improve their fine motor skills.

• Boosts self-confidence. When they play and have fun discovering what they are good at, they become more confident in their strength and skills. More they play, more confidence they`ll gain and their skills will blossom.

• Beat boredom and encourage the child to spend alone time, performing a safe activity with multiple benefits for his development.

• Foster lateral and analytical thinking. Free style building enables the child to use divergent thinking and learn that there are more ways to solve a problem.

• Encourage the ability to create new ideas by extending the boundaries of imagination. Nurturing their creativity can be challenging sometimes. That`s when these blocks come handy. You can build so many things with them! You can follow the given instructions or you can free-style! Both ways are a great way to generate new ideas.

• Teach life skills. Using a building block set with another child teaches the value of sharing and friendship. It makes the child more sociable and friendly. Spending time to build a structure builds patience and perseverance. Sorting the pieces, making sure they all fit, building the structure itself - all these are steps that pave the way to developing real life skills. Children learn how to deal with frustrations on their own. They become aware that being patient and persistent are key to succeeding in everything.

• Increase the attention span. By blending fun with learning, parents manage to keep their children engaged. Kids` attention span is short and having them focused can be challenging. When they are performing an activity that they enjoy, they assimilate the knowledge much faster than usual.

• Lay the foundation for future Maths classes. By counting the pieces, children learn the basics of Maths. By creating more complex structures, they will be able to understand faster geometry as it teaches kids to think in three dimensions.

• Enforce a healthy development. It helps the child develop mentally, socially and emotionally.

• Show that being different is okay. There is no wrong way to build a structure!

Tips for floor time with your child:

• Let your child build his own structure
• Refrain from telling him how it should be built
• Inquire about how the structure itself makes him feel
• Ask him to describe the structure to you and talk about its features/powers
• Encourage him to build a new structure each day
• Allow him to take apart the structure and restart even if you have spent more than two hours building it
• Encourage him to start building from scratch
• Practice what you preach

Other advantages of choosing building blocks as an educational toy for your child:

• affordable price
• no need to renew or update
• time resistant
• small sized
• can be used by girls and boys
• easy to store/clean

Lego is an amazing tool used even in schools as it supports thinking and collaboration.

What can you do with the building blocks when your child no longer needs them?

• You can pass them on to friends or family members with smaller children.
• You can donate them to Salvation Army or any other thrift store.
• You can give them to kids fighting cancer. See here the details.
• You can recycle them.
• You can incorporate them into an art project.
• You can use them in a DIY home project.
• You can ship them to Germany and have them turned into wheelchair ramps.

How about you? Are you a fan of building blocks? Would you care to share one of your kids` latest creations? Or maybe one of your own?

Drop me a line in the comments section below if you liked this post!