1. Motor Skills – building blocks help a child develop their motor skills and their hand-eye coordination. It’s not easy for toddlers to stack blocks in such a way that they form a tower or other structure. Also known as dexterity, fine motor skills flourish when a child learns how to coordinate the muscles in his or her hands. By manipulating blocks and other objects, young kids become adept at small physical actions like stacking and balancing.
2. Language and Communication Skills – sets of building blocks generally come with a variety of differently shaped and coloured pieces. Sometimes building blocks are decorated with letters, numbers, or simple pictures depicting farmyard animals and other ordinary things. By playing with blocks day-in and day-out, your child will begin to pick up on concepts like colours and shapes. You can encourage him or her to learn these, too. Ask your toddler to hand you the block with dots on it, to place the long skinny block on top of the wide block, or to choose a block that is the same colour as your t-shirt.
3. Creativity – It is fascinating to watch children at play. They work hard at it! And chances are that if you give one hundred different kids the same set of toy blocks, they will build one hundred different structures. Blocks are one of the best toys for enabling a child’s imagination and creativity to blossom. Stacking them in different configurations leads to almost infinite possibilities. It’s no wonder that we even use the phrase “building blocks” when we are talking about creating just about everything!
4. Spatial Intelligence – Are you good at arranging suitcases and boxes inside a car trunk so that no space is wasted? What about choosing the right size of a plastic container to hold all the leftover spaghetti sauce? That’s your spatial intelligence at work. Spatial reasoning is what allows us to visualize objects and their motion in our “mind’s eye.” Not only that, but high spatial intelligence is linked to other cognitive abilities, including problem-solving. As you can imagine, playing with building blocks is an incredibly effective way to develop spatial intelligence.
