Creative Time with Duplo and Lego

We bought little Ethan his first Mega Block Fire Station set with a fire truck for his 1st birthday. Those are big blocks that come in prime colors - red, blue, yellow. He loved the blocks and still play with it till to date, while the fire truck becomes one of baby Claire's crawling buddies now.

As Ethan grew older we bought him Duplo instead, it's the medium size blocks by Lego designed for toddler under 3+. One thing we love about Duplo & Lego is that all sets can easily integrate, so we can start him on standard set (with just normal blocks for building houses) to other interesting / theme based sets like cowboy town, race car etc.

This was built by Ethan alone when he was 3.5 yo. He explained the full logic behind these blocks to me and I was amazed with his ability to "problem solving"..

At first, there was only the tower. He said it's a defense tower with 2 canons on the sides. Then he built a launcher with a launch button.

Next, he said the canon is spoilt, cannot fire. So he sent an engineer to fix it. But the tower is too tall, so he built a bridge for theengineer to climb over the tower.

Then he said it's too dark, so he built a lamp post and now the engineer can see in the dark.

Atlas, he claimed it's all ready and finally he opened fire.

Pretty structural and logical thought, especially for someone of his age, isn't it? :)



Why do we introduce Mega Blocks and Duplo to our little one at such young age?

Firstly, it encourages creativity and imagination. Blocks are just blocks an it takes quite some creative thought to transform them into something interesting.

Besides, it is a good time for parent-child bonding without having little one fixated to iPad, TV or or PS games.

Develop fine motor skill, handling the blocks require good eye-hand coordination

Finally, train up the ability to focus. Designing and constructing requires lot of patience and thinking, so it's ideal to let LO learn to sit still and focus on getting a job done.

Apart from structures, hub and I had been engaging Ethan into building a lot of other stuffs:
- Guns with reloader
- Ball tower
- Alphabets tower (giant alphabet)
- Drinking mug
- Robots

I did not managed to keep photos of all of these creations, but I shall make an effort to upload them from time to time. Gesh... Weekends are so fun, how I wish everyday is weekend!

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