The toys that go on forever

And How We Homeschooled Today #111

Toys that go on forever

A few days ago the children (aged 6 and 8) asked to get out the box of Duplo that has been sitting under a bed for three months. Ever since, they have done very little besides play with it—literally for hours and hours every day. This is Duplo that I played with myself when I was a child, and it is still going strong many decades later. Looking back through previous posts, I see that they had another Duplo binge in November, and in the September heatwave we used the bricks in the paddling pool to explore sinking and floating.

It is amazing to see how two children, who are capable of reading The Hobbit and building Lego models with hundreds of tiny pieces, can still be completely enthralled by a box of giant Duplo bricks that they’ve been playing with since the age of 2. It’s also amazing how long children can concentrate on the same activity, completely engrossed in their own world.

It got me thinking about the children’s toys that go on and on and on. They are invariably the open-ended toys, the ones that children can make into whatever they want. The flashy, electronic, talking, whizzing, moving toys that look so appealing in shops and catalogues and TV ads, which children beg for, and which adults sometimes feel are the most generous, exciting gifts, usually have a very short shelf-life. Toys that do it all with minimal input from the children just aren’t very interesting for very long. The classic story of the toddler who’s more interested in the cardboard box than the gift inside is entirely accurate.

It reminds me of this page from It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be:

Wonky picture, but I feel that’s in keeping with what we’re talking about here.

In our house, the toys that have had the most use are:

• Duplo and Lego, obviously. New parents: you don’t have to buy expensive new sets. The fun comes from the endless possibilities, and personally I think a set discourages this. Also, the sets generally end up in a big mixed-up pile anyway, although some children love to display their finished models. Buy 1kg mixed bags on eBay or when you see them in second-hand shops.

• Kapla Planks. My own children don’t always build structures with theirs, but they build huge sprawling networks on the carpet, which become a background for numerous other toys and games. I’m guessing building blocks and magnetic tiles fall into the same category. On a bigger scale, I love

  Dixie Dillon Lane
  ’s idea of giving her children fifty eight-foot two-by-fours to build with outside:

  

  Dixie’s children playing with their jumbo planks.

• Fisher Price cash register. I bought this second-hand when the children were small and it has fascinated so many children. It seems indestructible. Although children won’t engage with electronic gizmos for long (screens excepted, obviously), they are fascinated by mechanics: how the coin gets from the top slot into the bottom drawer, or out the trap-door at the side.

• Brio Builder System. These aren’t available to buy new anymore but there are lots available secondhand. The pieces are pleasingly chunky, and once you’ve made the intended vehicle, you can take it apart and put it together again in endless combinations. There’s a similar-looking newer version too.

• Dress-up wooden dolls/bears, small wooden toy animals, toy soldiers, uncountable toy vehicles. The children play ongoing, involved, imaginary games with all of these. (No, I don’t love that they play with toy soldiers. But you have to pick your battles—excuse the pun.)

• At my parents’ house the children play for days with the Playmobil dolls’ house and pirate ship that my brother and I had as children. My hunch is that they wouldn’t play with them quite as much if the toys lived in our own home, but it’s still a good return on investment, three decades after the original purchase.

What are the toys that have been played with forever in your family? Bonus points for toys that have been passed down the generations. And if your favourite toys are electronic gizmos, feel free to disagree with me!

The lovely building blocks, bottom right, are from Grimm’s.

---

How we homeschooled today #111

• The children got up and immediately carried on playing with the Duplo (left out from yesterday, because what was the point in putting it away only to have to tip it out at 7am with that unbelievably loud Duplo crash?)

• Yesterday they told me that rhinos communicate by writing in their poo. Clearly this is nonsense, and I told them so, but they were insistent. So today I looked it up, and we learnt that rhinos do indeed communicate using poo, but not, obviously, by writing in it. Everybody felt like they’d won the argument, and we all learnt something about rhinos.

• At 9am I asked them to pause the Duplo game, and we started work:

  • A reminder of how to spell Wed-nes-day

  • Today’s spellings (I introduce them in the morning, and the children write them out in the afternoon.)

  • A refresher of yesterday’s French, which led onto a discussion about adjectives: what they are, and how they often follow the noun in French but precede the noun in English. Each child read me a sentence from their current book and then thought of an adjective to describe one of the nouns in the sentence.

  • A few more cards from Multiplication by Heart

  • A fun fraction game from the Math For Love Fraction Curriculum we’re currently working through.

• That all took nearly an hour, so then we took a break (Duplo).

• Then onto the sofa, where we read about Yosemite’s Firefall in Amazing Earth. That prompted us to read about granite and igneous rocks in Rockopedia, which tied in with our crystal learning from the latest Curiosity Box. We went through some French flashcards about food. And then I read about the Battle of Crécy in Timelines of Everything. Yesterday we read about the Hundred Years’ War in two different books, so this was a continuation on the theme. Then we read the page giving an overview of the whole of medieval Europe, but it proved way beyond us and the children—yes, you guessed it—went back to the Duplo.

• At lunch I wrote some key dates of the Hundred Years’ War on the blackboard, and when the table was cleared the children each chose one to write out and add to their history folders. My husband came in and chatted with the children about the period (he makes it much more exciting than I do).

• Now it’s 3pm, and the ‘work’ part of the day is definitely over. We intended to have some quiet reading time after lunch but everyone forgot, because the children went right back to the Duplo. My daughter’s going to show me how she’s learnt to climb a tree, and later this afternoon she’ll go off to Cub Scouts while my son stays at home and plays a lot of card games, and I will ponder what to read now that I’ve finished David Copperfield.

  ---

  Thanks for reading. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up for free and never miss a post.