Motherly Notes Methods – Nurture Love Educate

By now you probably know I’m not a sit down type of mom who likes to do everything from the books. Whenever I have a “building toy” that’s open ended, I dive for it. When I saw this set, I instantly bought 2 sets of it. By now you should already know I am a shopaholic when it comes to children’s items because I never think one set would allow full imagination and creation to take place. My worst nightmare is to see them want to create something and then run out of pieces.

I bought this set when my kids were actually only three and one. This means it required supervision. My kids weren’t the eat your toy type but still, if they are holding a stick and went off balance, I don’t want them to poke themselves in the eyes so I had to sit there with them and make sure they were always “sitting” solidly while playing with these.

The one year old loved to pick up the sticks and put them in a bucket I gave her and then scatter them and hear them clang against each other. My three year old who already knew her shapes loved building with these. The round balls have different numbers of holes for the different color and it can either make a right angle or an acute angle with a different degree given the color. Since there were only two colors, it only takes the child a few tries to know that if they wanted to make a square or an octagon, they’d be searching for different balls to get the angles they want the sticks to stick out of. See how this is educational?

At the time my three year old was great at doing squares and triangles. She was building a cube up above. I love toys that you can play for many years and can grow with you so this is one of those that I pull out every few months so they find it nice and refreshing again.

Some negatives is that when you stick in the sticks, they’re not going to be SOOO tight that a shape won’t fall apart if you pull on it. If you think you can build a sphere and then kick it like a ball, think again. It’s more of build it, admire it like a sculpture, take it down and rebuild sort of deal. I also don’t like a bunch of round balls rolling around but that’s to be expected for this to work. I stored these in my own bigger bucket so it’s easier to them to find the right sticks quickly.

I loved using it to teach my children shapes like pentagon, hexagon, octagon, etc. I loved showing them how a circle turns into a cylinder in 3D. It really puts stuff that they have on paper into real life and they can see it done!

You can buy them from Amazon or any other toy store or from Learning Resources.