Back to Basics- B is for Blocks

It’s time again for some Back to Basics play ideas – and this time is B is for Blocks now whether your blocks are large, small or anything in between, made of wood, made of plastic, soft or even tupperware containers from the kitchen. Blocks can be so much fun.

Block Animals

So I know that last week was A is for Animals but one of J’s favourite activities to do with our megablocks is to build animals out of them. He loves building long necked giraffes and green crocodiles as well as crabs and spiders (although spiders tend to be a single block that climb the walls) and whenever the block box comes out this is one of the first things that he will do.

Can you guess what animal we made?

Castles and forts

Duplo/Megablocks (you know the chunky blocks) they make great castles and forts as have ready made battlements around the top of each brick. When we play castles and forts you can normal find some of our people inside playing the roles of knights and royalty or cowboys (yes I’m old school cowboys have forts in our house)!

How high can we go

The most basic fun with blocks – building a tower as high as we can, some blocks are easier to do this with than others, we have blocks that for some reason just don’t want to form a stable tower and for J these are the most fun – he loves trying to get it higher and higher without it toppling over – T though gets easily frustrated with these and prefers blocks that are much more stable to build with.

Making Shapes

One of our sets of blocks has squares, rectangles and triangles in them we love sitting and making different shapes with them. They may not be real shapes (as in have technical names) but as we make them we count the sides, say the colours of the blocks and what shapes we used to make them up.

What kind of play is your favourite type of play with blocks?