Toys that encourage "making"

I interact with toys in three primary roles: a mom, an educator, and a person who likes to play with toys. I find that I'm drawn to similar types of toys in all three roles. I like toys that don't tell you how you should play - toys that allow and encourage different forms of play. In short, I like toys that let you "Make" things or experiences.

As a mom, I like my child to play with building toys, art toys, and toys that encourage make believe. Blocks, Legos, magnetic building shapes, tinker toys, crayons, paints, playdoh are some of our favorite building and art supplies. For make believe, some of the same toys - especially Legos encourage stories and make-believe, but also hats, a kid-size kitchen and household items like brooms and dishes.

As a STEM educator, I want my students to engage with toys that help then engage in science and engineering practices. I want them to design things, build things, and try to explain. This means I like materials for building robots, simple CAD-type software and programming interfaces like Scratch (yes I consider software toys), and things like magnets and oobleck that create opportunities to make sometimes surprising observations.

As a person who likes to play with toys, I like these same kinds of toys --  Legos and robotics -- things I can put together and manipulate on my own - and arts and craft supplies and tools.

What I tend not to like are toys that want you to "push a button" to make something specific happen. This is often a "feature" of electronic toys and electronic aspects added to other toys (a farm that neighs when you push the right spot) or otherwise invite play in only one specific "right" way.

Blocks

Blocks are wonderful. My daughter creates tall towers, small towers, wide towers, and narrow towers, and she calls them cities, hotels, houses, or the names of stores that we regularly shop at. Sometimes it is just about the process of building (and "knocking") and sometimes her Lego people or stuffed animals inhabit her structures for stories and make-believe. Sometimes she sorts colors and sizes and shapes of blocks. Sometimes she makes patterns. Sometimes it's a solitary activity and other times she engages Mom and Dad. The same pieces knocked down, repurposed, and reorganized become new structures, new toys. Toys of her design and imagination.

GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine

I got a GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine set for my students who work with elementary school students to fiddle with. But, of course, I let my pre-schooler play with it. This is a toy designed and marketed towards girls. It comes with a story book and materials (peg board, spools, pegs, washers, and a ribbon) to follow along and make the spinning machine that Goldie makes in the book. My daughter (age 2.5) enjoyed putting the pegs in the board and the spools on the pegs and pulling the ribbon to make the animals spin around. The target age is 6, but my daughter regularly asks to play with Mommy's "round and round animals." She likes figuring out how to make them go. She also matches the animals to the pictures of them in the story. We even used the spools and pegs to make a little car one day.

I made it

My 2 year old's ability to put thoughts into words is exploding and she frequently provides her opinions, desires, thoughts or recollections about what she sees. She tells us "I like that" "I no like it" "It makes me happy," but my very very favorite thing for me to hear her say is "I made this."

She regularly points things out around the house - paintings, items from home depot's kids workshops, lego constructions and tells us, "I made this."

A Lego Playground

My daughter has been building a playground. She is quite adept at Duplo Legos (bigger Legos made for smaller hands). She makes planes, boats, hotels, and trains with her Duplos. Last week she even made a "Costco" "full of all the things" (a pretty good description of Costco). 

She is not yet, however, very skilled at putting together and taking apart regular size Legos and she really really wants to build with them. So she has become "foreman of the playground" and her dad and I are the construction workers. She directs, "we need a slide" and she finds the pieces and dad puts them together. She states, "We need a swing" and mom figures out a way to make the swing move. When she discovered that the Duplo figures couldn't sit in the swing (but Lego mini-figs could), she declared "That swing is for babies. We need a big swing" -- one for duplo-sized people." And then "Nana needs a bench to sit on." There's no kit, no directions on what we should build, or picture on the box to limit her ideas. Whatever she imagines, we collectively figure out a way to create. This collaborative project has lasted for days and she wants to leave other activities (like the zoo!) to go home and play with her playground.