The Greatest Toy Ever

If you are like me, every year around Christmas you ask yourself the same questions.

"What should I get my kid this year?" I'm tired of all of the toys that do little more than make a bunch of noise and end up in storage or broken after a couple of months. How much money have you wasted on some hunk of plastic your child just had to have, only to see it quickly discarded or forgotten? I was talking to a friend of mine about this very topic, and he told me that he had found the greatest toy ever made. It doesn't take batteries, plug in to the TV, make loud noises, or break after a few hours of play.
He told me, "My kids play with it all the time, and never seem to get tired of it.
" Needles to say, he piqued my interest.

What is this miracle toy? He took me downstairs, and in the middle of his rec room were his two kids playing with a set of wooden blocks.

"Blocks?! How in the world is *that* the greatest toy ever?" I asked.

He told me that he didn't know why, but his kids play with them all the time, and that he was going to buy them another set because his kids always seem to be running out of the blocks they want. I remembered playing with my own block set as a kid (as I'm sure you did), and so I asked my parents, who never throw anything away, if they still had them.
After a little digging in the attic, they found that old block set, good as new.

When I got it home, my son almost instantly started stacking the blocks into a tall tower.
He knocked that over and built a raft, then a cabin, then a road, then a labyrinth, etc.
Before I knew it a couple of hours had passed.
I was starting to be convinced that this simple toy really is one of the best toys ever made.
I figured that I would wait a few weeks to see if the blocks would be forgotten like most of his other toys, but he played with them all the time.

When other kids would come over to play, they would flock to that old block set, leaving the video games on the shelf.
What is it about these blocks? There must be something to them, or they wouldn't be such a favorite to most every kid that plays with them.

I decided to do a little research, and found that a teacher named Caroline Pratt developed these "Standard Unit Blocks" over a hundred years ago as a teaching tool for her students. A unit block is 1 3/8" x 2 3/4" x 5 1/2", and every other block in one of these sets is a multiple or fraction of this standard size.
While playing with blocks, kids learn the relationships between the different sizes, and figure out how to arrange them so they can build what they are imagining.

I think this is the key as to why kids love playing with these blocks: Kids love to learn, especially while they are playing, and blocks give them the perfect opportunity to have fun while they are developing key cognitive, social, and motor skills. Because there is no "right" or "wrong" way to play with blocks, kids feel free to try any number of different block combinations to build what they are imagining. This "open-ended" nature of blocks makes them ideal for developing creativity, as well as basic math and language skills. (That's a lot to get out of some hunks of wood!).
Unfortunately, finding a set of these standard unit blocks in a store is almost impossible.

Mostly, what you find in stores are sets that have lots of tiny, brightly colored blocks.

The problem with these blocks is that because the pieces are so small and light kids have a hard time stacking them and easily get frustrated.
I found some online and at a local 'high end' toy store that use the "Standard Unit Block" model.
If you have young kids, start out with a small toddler set.
You can always buy more blocks to enhance the collection as they grow and start building more elaborate structures.

I know it is hard to believe that a set of wooden blocks is one of the greatest toys ever, but once your kids start playing with them (and keep playing with them) I'm sure you'll be convinced.