#7 Blocks

December 9th, 2010

blocks

Blocks are one of those timeless toys. Children can create anything with them! For geography, my children have made Stonehenge, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, an amphitheater, and many other structures.

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My children built a birdhouse out of blocks when we were studying birds.

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Even though my boys have not seen the Transformer movies, we checked out the cartoons from the video store. My boys are fascinated with how a car can turn into a robot. Transformers didn’t get into the top 10 toys of our home, but they would have been in the top 20 for sure. My kids made a robot that transformed into an airplane. They laid out the robot, then they re-arranged the blocks into an airplane. Hence, it transformed!

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One thing about blocks is that they can be combined with other toys for limitless fun. My children particularly like making cities with ramps for little matchbox cars to drive down.

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Small children can play with blocks, and I’m amazed that my 10 year old still isn’t bored with them. So it has earned place #7 on my countdown of the best open-ended toys ever.

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#8 Tinker Toys

December 8th, 2010

tinker-toys

I remember playing with Tinker Toys when I was little. My favorite thing to make was a swing set. I liked the fact that the toy parts could move even when they were connected together.

My boys have always loved making windmills and other invented contraptions. They also like going into the cupboard to hammer away on pretend nails, especially when they were younger. The children have sometimes added string to their inventions. Recently they made a working fishing pole.

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I found several videos to inspire your children, just in case you already own Tinker Toys and don’t know what to do with them. I saw a fun catapult and a crane, both working great!

#9 Toy Gears

December 7th, 2010

toy-gears

Toy gears didn’t originally make it onto my top 10 list of the “Best Toys of All Time” until “art supplies” got thrown out due to the fact that they can’t be classified as toys. Even though we don’t own this set any more, my children played with it for hours upon hours during the 5 years we owned it when they were younger. It seemed to me like it wasn’t as versatile as some of our other construction sets.

gears

However, this didn’t keep my kids from inventing things that had something to do with what we were studying. One of my sons built a Greek structure based on a picture from a book, and a year later, he built a spit for roasting meat during our medieval feast. He did this without any prompting from me. I never would have come up with these structures myself.

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Of course, all sorts of airplanes and robots can be made, as well as crazy contraptions. Even my young daughter enjoyed playing with the toy gears because she liked turning a crank and watching all the colorful gears go round and round. For this reason, toy gears earned its way to #9 in our countdown for the best open-ended toys.

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#10 Electronics Kit

December 6th, 2010

electronics-kit

My kids have enjoyed playing with an electronics kit for years, so I am including it as #10 in the countdown for the best open-ended toys ever. I’m judging open-ended toys based on the sheer number of hours my kids have spent with them, and the fact that they learn a lot while having fun. Because I have 3 boys and only one girl, I’ve used my top two favorite open-ended toys for girls in the countdown, from when I was a child growing up with 3 sisters. I spent literally hundreds of hours as a girl playing with my top two favorite toys. No other toys compare to those two girl toys, in my mind.

I’ve included toys for younger as well as older kids. This electronics experiment, for example, is for slightly older kids. This video shows the most fascinating experiment I’ve seen with the electronics kit, which is a piano made out of pencil lead. The circuit is completed because the lead of the pencil conducts electricity. Depending on where you place the wires, you hear a different sound!

This year all three of my boys played with their electronics kit more than any other toy.