3-year-olds are learning and developing new skills every day and love to try new things. Choose Age-appropriate activities can help them build confidence. on their new talents. These preschoolers want activities that are new but not too difficult, frustrating, or time consuming. A toy that preschoolers love is a set of wooden blocks. Construction toys are the perfect toy to improve your budding new skills. Here are 3 suggestions to encourage your preschooler to play with these great educational toys.

1-Build familiar things for your child

A 3-year-old child likes to reproduce things that he knows. For example, they can build a house or a barn, but not a castle. Your preschooler can make a simple car but not a spaceship. They may want to build a dog but don’t know how to recreate a dragon. A 3-year-old’s imagination is developing, but he prefers to draw, pretend, and build things that are real to him.

Small 2-build projects

A child this age still has a fairly short attention span. He doesn’t overwhelm them with a large number of blocks at once. An appropriate number of blocks for this age would be 60 to 80 pieces. Investing in a larger set that they can use as they grow is a good idea, but at this age you may want to only get a limited number of blocks.

Encourage projects that they could complete in maybe 5 or 10 minutes. Projects that are too complex or large will make them lose interest. If they lose interest, they may end up just dropping the blocks and that will frustrate you too.

Children this age mostly use square and rectangular blocks. They don’t use many varied shapes at this age. They will only use some blocks, such as triangles and arcs. For the most part, they will use the basic shapes that are easy to stack.

Keep your projects simple, like making a small, simple house with four walls, not a big mansion with a 5-car garage. If they have to stack multiple blocks to complete a project, they may lose interest or become frustrated. Let your child build something that he can finish successfully. This helps build their confidence. Congratulate them on their achievements. Helping them succeed encourages them to build bigger and more complex things when they are ready. Be sure to help them build to their level so they will want to come back to create another day.

Low structures of 3 constructions or table designs

A 3 year old still has limited balance skills. So remember you don’t always have to hoard! Instead of stacking blocks, ask them to build something that is only one or two blocks high. For example, a row of blocks lined up across the room will make a wonderful train. As they get older and play more with the blocks, they will begin to add wheels to their train, a chimney, or cargo on the wagons. They could make a row or two of blocks into squares that could be cages in a zoo and add their favorite plastic or stuffed animals.

Another fun activity is to let them line up blocks on the table. They can shape or copy simple outlines of objects with the blocks by laying the pieces flat on the table. You can give them a very simple image, like a page from a coloring book. They could line up blocks just above the page outline or ask them to copy the shape on the table to make the shape. These table layouts are really creative. They can create creatures, vehicles, people or their favorite superheroes. Make funny faces using the different shaped blocks for eyes, ears and a bow to smile or frown. There is no limit to these creative table layouts.

Many toys today are electronic, “high tech” and have specific ways of playing with them. In our business for the last 5 years, we have noticed children of all ages who don’t know what to do with a set of wooden blocks. They will ask you “What do you do with this?” when on a table full of blocks. They don’t know how to stack them and quickly become frustrated or disinterested. But educators, researchers, and parents know the tremendous value of playing with simple toys that engage a child’s imagination. These types of toys help them develop important cognitive and motor skills and help them learn complex math and science concepts. It is important that young children play with these types of educational toys. Make sure your little one grows up loving playing with wooden building blocks.