Children will gravitate towards a large pile of red cardboard building blocks when they get to their day care center or a fun zone play area. Open-ended toys also make the best educational children’s toys you can provide your children.
Sometimes you may want to start a game to play to get all the kids involved equally together. Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started.
After they children have played for a while and arranged the blocks their way, you could begin talking about how they arranged their building blocks, each child will be eager to share his thoughts on their structure.
Then you could put the cardboard blocks in a circle. All of the blocks you are using are touching and you have a space in the middle. Such a corral will open up new and exciting games the kids will provide.
Have the children work together and have some children put stack of large blocks horizontally and make columns, have one child place one block over the top and you now have a bridge that cars can go underneath allowing the children to incorporate their cars, trucks and other toys into the fun.
Whatever structure the children have built you can talk about the number of blocks used, saying, “You decided to use 6 blocks for this building, what would it look like if you added three more blocks”. If you have a set with more than one color you could select a certain child to get a blue or yellow block and add it to the already built structure.
Watching children play with their blocks you will have opportunities to see how each is developing socially and notice a shy child holding back a little. Incorporating some of the above ideas may help the shy child get involved.