Building bridges is an easy play activity for toddlers or preschoolers, and best of all, it puts those engineering brains and fine motor skills to work!
Ben and I are huge fans of versatile, long lasting toys for our girls. We have a whole process for choosing toys written in this guide, if you’re curious!
What’s so great about a simple, classic building toy like wooden blocks, is that it can be played with in different ways and used to create different play scenarios.
Now, our wooden blocks have spent the last six months in a box.
The second we got our first set of magnetic tiles, these blocks kind of fell by the wayside.
I’m not concerned. The girls love doing all sorts of activities like these with magnetic tiles!
But now that mag-tile fever has died down, I thought it would be great to get back to the basic-basics and pull out the wooden blocks again.
Simple blocks are so good for kids’ development. The act of building, knocking over, and balancing teaches them about basic physics concepts and helps kids develop their fine motor skills.
All great stuff for our little engineers!
Out of curiosity, do you have a set of these at home? How often do they get played with?
Leave a comment below, then scroll back up here to finish reading!
Setting Up the Activity
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For this activity, I put the following supplies in a tray:
Sidenotes about these supplies: Some of our craft sticks were painted rainbow colors because they are left over from this rainbow puzzle activity.
The peg dolls were hand-painted by me using acrylic paint. I sprayed them with clear spray paint to seal.
Before we began the activity, Elena (my 4-year-old) and I talked about what material the objects were all made of (wood).
We also talked briefly about where wood comes from and what else in our house is made of wood.
She’s always been interested in knowing what things are made of (wood, metal, glass, plastic, and cloth are the ones we’ve covered), and I wanted to highlight the fact that all the toys in the metal tray were made of wood.
Anyway, moving on!
After this, we called the 2-year-old over to come play.
She began building a block tower.
A 15-month-old toddler can stack 2 blocks, while an 18-month-old toddler should be able to stack 4 or more blocks. Two-year-olds should be working on towers of 6 or more blocks! (Source)
As I mentioned earlier, it’s been over 6 months since we’ve had these wooden blocks out. I was surprised to see how much more adept my now 2-year-old was than she was back then!
She was able to build an 8-block tower before she knocked it over, whereas previously she had only been building 3-block towers.
It’s always surprising to see our little ones grow and change, isn’t it?
The Building Bridges Activity
While Lia did that, I suggested that Elena build bridges for the peg dolls to walk across.
Elena really liked that idea!
She built a couple block towers and set a jumbo craft stick across the top.
For us, this concept is very simple. For young kids, it’s quite complex.
Elena had to figure out that both towers needed to be the same height (use the same number of blocks) in order to get a level bridge.
She also figured out that the towers needed to be a certain distance from each other so that the ends of the craft sticks would reach the tops of the towers.
I watched her grasp this concept through trial and error, and then helped her put what she learned into words.
“To make a bridge, I saw that you had to make sure you used the same number of blocks in each tower and that you had to move the towers closer together so that the popsicle stick would reach.”
After some experimenting, Elena decided that single block bridges were much faster and easier to work with, so she built those exclusively.
Lia and I built a seesaw for the peg dolls!
Eventually, we moved the party from the table to the floor and created a long series of bridges.
I left the tray of bridge building supplies and peg dolls out for the girls to explore over the next several days.
The only rule was that they had to clean up whatever they took out.
Elena built this obstacle course one afternoon. She explained that you have to hop over each one to get through.
Your Turn to Do the Building Bridges Activity
Ready to try this activity at home?
Feel free to swap out any of the supplies you don’t already have.
Thanks for reading, and hope you have a happy week!
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