The Best Design And Construct Toys & Montessori Materials, Building At Home With Kids
My love of interesting versatile developmental toys started many years ago, initially due to the collection my sister put together for her boys. Later during my work in program development and creating a community/family developmental toy lending library I had so many things in mind that I pictured our future children loving, learning, creating and exploring with.
I thought I would share the favourites that we own and love with you.
There are many varying opinions for toys out there, and we are toy enthusiasts so you will find no judgement here or great toy debate. I firmly believe that in following your child and their passions it will lead you to some amazing choices that are a fantastic fit for them.
The moments I feel that the amount of toys become an issue (speaking for us here) is if I haven't planned storage to house them in a manageable child friendly and accessible way. At times if I get overwhelmed with organization I try to remember that it was I who made these purchases in love.
As our children grow we make toy choices based more specific interests. We have amazing family support who ask us what our children would love in terms of gifts. We also take advantage of great local used sites to find deals on more expensive items like Playmobil. In Canada we also have a discount retailer Winners/Home Sense that often has amazing deals on incredible (often more expensive toys) found at exclusive retailers.
Our children love a range toys, and toys designed for all types of design and construction. They also have a tremendous love of creative and imaginative dramatic play so we have lots of dress up, different types of dolls and figures (especially Playmobil) and puppets. Art and crafting supplies etc.
In this post I will concentrate on our developmental toy collection and our current storage set up in our new (er) family room. We designed and built our family room addition last fall with help from family, friends and neighbours. This was a huge amount of work! In the end we were able to design the room around our needs, and most importantly greatly needed storage. We live in an old historic house that we adore, but storage space had always been an issue. Planning for this space was many years in the making, so it was pretty amazing to see it take form.
On to our our toy favourites! Remember this is a collection that grew over many years with our
children. These are all toys and materials that we own and purchased. None of the toys featured here are paid for product review. The links we will provide are affiliate links that if clicked are at no cost to you, but could result in a small amount to help fund our site. Thank you in advance!
Marble Run
Marble Run is by far one of our most favourite toys to design and build with. It's incredible in all aspects of learning related building concepts like stability, balance, gravity, potential and kinetic energy. It's just amazing. it can be quite challenging for younger builders and we often built with our children. As they grew they experimented with amazing designs on their own.
