Did you ever enjoy playing with regular wood building blocks?

I still remember what they smell like.
And yep, I liked them. :slight_smile: But then again there wasn’t that much to play with, and as a kid, too many things kind of glaze you over anyway, even as an adult. It’s good to do simple things enough to learn how to make them complicated, rather than just grazing the tops of things, not realizing their potential 'cause there’s no need to.

If that made sense!

The small ones are really, really small. Go for the full-size Melissa and Doug ones–I looked at every block set out there, and they were the best. You really want two sets, and while that seems like a lot–a bit more than $100–it’s really not. Blocks are a toy enhancer. They make all the other toys–cars, action figures, My Little Ponys, Barbie, whatever, more fun because you can build settings for them. A video game is $50, and a kid will play that for what? A year at the most? Blocks stay in the rotation for a decade.

My kid doesn’t have a ton of toys, and even fewer that we paid actual money for. But he’s got blocks out the wazoo, and if it ever seems like he’d benefit from more, I won’t hesitate. I honestly can’t think of a single toy that is better for creative play and lasts longer.

Why go for an expensive name brand? Brooke’s happy with her bucket of blocks from Kmart that cost all of about $10…

Here they are

Great story WhyNot!

Yay for buying the blocks. I remember playing with them in preschool. Then somehow (did the preschool go out of business?) we ended up with the whole rolling cart from my school in our basement. I played with them into my teenage years.

Strangely, of my three sons, only my youngest has been really interested in wooden blocks, while legos are popular all around. Youngest is also the only one who likes stuffed animals. Funny how kids are different.

See, those are small ones, right? The small-scale Melissa & Doug blocks are only $15. The poster above you has recommended the BIG building blocks and that’s why they’re expensive.

I’m torn. I understand the appeal of big blocks. But (1) money and (2) dings in our hardwood floors… which wouldn’t be a problem with the small blocks.

Edited to say: my response was to lisiate. I’ve switched the note on Mimi’s Amazon wish list to the big Melissa & Doug set, plus their “architectural” expansion set.

Wooden blocks are great, but for long lasting fun, I recommend the expensive but worth it magna-tiles. My girls have been using them for nearly ten years already. They are wonderful. Get the grandparents to spring for them!

Also, Duplos are wonderful. We still occasionally play with them, although really we should be all Lego by now.

I picked up a set of those cardboard blocks once at a garage sale. Good stuff. Really, you need more than one type of block if you want your kids to grow up to be engineers or architects or city planners or …

That makes more sense then. The small ones I linked to are just big enough to not be a choking hazard (although YMMV) The smallest pieces (the cubes) are about 2" x 2" I think.

Aside from not denting hardwood floors the little blocks hurt less when she throws them at you.

I only liked playing with my day care’s building blocks and only if I could have them relatively to myself, because they had hundreds of them in all sizes, some quite big. I didn’t enjoy playing with sets where you couldn’t make much of anything out of them. Then again that’s also the problem with Lego, but Lego tends to come with more pieces naturally.

Absofuckinglutely. My brother and I both loved our blocks! We had a big heavy set like Shagnasty linked to and like 4 random colored blocks thrown in. Somehow we managed to have a couple big long 18" ones too. Awesome!

I know we did Duplo before the wooden blocks and Lego after. Or maybe Lego simultaneously. The blocks were cool because they were big enough for GI Joe or even Barbie to enjoy.

It probably helped that our bedroom floors were tile. Very easy to build.

My 3-year-old niece is into building all of a sudden. She has much smaller, lighter blocks right now, like the ones lisiate linked to. When she’s old enough not to kill her sister with them, she’ll get the big blocks.

If anyone is interested in cardboard blocks…I made about a zillion of them from mail-order shipping boxes (mostly Amazon) and small product boxes (iPod!), stuffed them with old newspaper and plastic grocery bags for stability, taped shut with Duct tape and wrapped in Contact paper. Fun project!

wood blocks show physics and how things fall over. practical life skills.

Oh, hell yeah!

My dad has always had a woodshop and during the hard candy Christmas years, designed and added to our block collection. Now, as a retiree who’s tethered pretty close to home (he cares for Mom), he’s taken up building mongo, well designed sets (Shagnasty’s set is similar, but smaller) for family, friends, daycare centers, preschools and kindergardens. Even I have a set of ~200 pieces. :slight_smile: I’m nearly fifty years old and occasionally, I’ll get on the floor and build stuff with kids who are at my house.

My grandmother had a cube of “Boole Blocks,” which are flat geometric shapes, much like Tangrams, intended to be fun and educational. They weren’t intended for building up in height…but an inventive kid certainly could, and I spent many an hour making extremely unstable sculptures with 'em.

My mom bought a set of wooden blocks for my oldest brother (16 years older than I am). I haven’t seen anything quite like them in years, though the large Melissa and Doug blocks are closest. They’re big - the size of 2x4s - and mostly various sizes of rectangle, though there are a few curved pieces and a Y-shaped one that I always turned upside down and made into a church door.

All my siblings played with them, and most of us wrote on them at one point or another. Then my mom gave them to my sister for her kids, now in their 20s. Then my sister gave them to my brother for his kids, now around 10. Then my brother gave them to me for my boys, and they’re in my basement right now, becoming castles and robots and car ramps and occasionally weapons. They’re more than 50 years old, and every kid that comes into this house loves them. The middle-school kids I work with come in and build stuff.

Get the blocks. The good ones. :slight_smile:

A good set of solid maple blocks can cost you a pretty penny but they have staying power. Uniformity of weight and shape, actual right angles, solid weight, so on … with good blocks my kids could build towers significantly taller than they were. Limited only by one of them being unable to resist the joy of knocking it down! You only get what you pay for with the cheap ones.

I did. Never could get into Lego or even Lincoln Logs. Those held no attraction for me whatsoever.

Well, I think I’m sold on getting the large-scale blocks instead of small ones, when I get around to getting them. I think that I didn’t enjoy my own wooden blocks because they were small–my whole set fit into a box the size of an oatmeal container.

Maybe somebody will pick them off of her wishlist for Christmas; if not they’re a candidate for her birthday in March. Unfortunately I’ve already gotten her so much for Christmas that it embarasses even me, hee hee.

one of the few ultra-clear memories of my early childhood is playing with plain old wooden blocks.
nothing, not the E-Z Bake oven, the tinker toys, the dolls and games - nothing was so intriguing and fun as those plain old wooden blocks.

I’m not sure I’d trust a not-yet-2 year old with wooden blocks. We had some, but by the time the Firebug could be trusted with something so hard, dense, and throwable, he was already well into stuff like Lego duplos and Thomas/Chuggington train sets.

There wasn’t much you could do with Lincoln Logs. Build a log cabin or a fort, that’s about it. People don’t believe me when I tell them I was never into Lego. I never saw any until I was 12, and I was already making plenty of things out of wood and other materials by then, so they just didn’t attract me. I did help my little brother with his, the minimalist instruction diagrams could be a little tricky to work out.

Wood blocks were pretty simple, but they were just plain fun.

I don’t think I even had any Legos myself, but my friends did. “What the fuck are these things good for?” is a good paraphrase of my thoughts about them when I tried my hand with them.