Building Toys

Toy blocks (also building bricks, or simply blocks), are wooden or plastic piece of various shapes (square, cylinder, arch, triangle, etc.) and colors that are used as building toys. Sometimes toy blocks depict letters of the alphabet. more...

History

Witold Rybczynski has found that the earliest mention of building bricks for children appears in Maria and R.L. Edgeworth's Practical Education (1798). Called "rational toys," blocks were intended to teach children about gravity and physics, as well as spatial relationships that allow them to see how many different parts become a whole. (Rybczynski, Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture, 1992).

During the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Cole (under the pseudonym of Felix Summerly) wrote a series of children’s books. Cole's A book of stories from The Home Treasury included a box of terracotta toy blocks. It was accompanied by actual blueprints that were contained in an accompanying pamphlet entitled "Architectural Pastime."

Educational Benefits

• Physical benefits: toy blocks build strength in a child’s fingers and hands, and improve eye-hand coordination.

• Social benefits: block play encourages children to make friends and cooperate, and is often one of the first experiences a child has playing with others.

• Intellectual benefits: children can potentially develop their vocabularies as they learn to describe sizes, shapes, and positions. Math skills are developed through the process of grouping, adding, and subtracting. Experiences with gravity, balance, and geometry learned from toy blocks also provide intellectual stimulation.

• Creative benefits: children receive creative stimulation by making their own designs with blocks.

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