Invitations to Build: Encouraging Creative Play with Building Toys
Building play has tons of developmental benefits to children of all ages! It provides opportunities for children to discover, practice, and experiment with concepts of balance, symmetry, repetition, patterns, and more, which are all directly connected to the big ideas of STEAM education.
You can support this kind of play with building toys of all kinds by encouraging your children to build using play invitations. A play invitation is a simple visual or verbal prompt that inspires play.
How to Create an Invitation to Play
Do:
- Create an uncluttered area for building play
- Lay out the building toys in an easily accessible, visually appealing way
- Give a very simple, open ended, verbal (or written) prompt
Don’t:
- Tell the child exactly what to build
- Build for the child
- Intervene in the child’s play
Here are some examples of invitations to play that we LOVE for small scale building, try them with any of the table-top toys mentioned below.
1. Build a home for a tiny friend
In this invitation you’ll need your favorite building toy and a small toy or figurine your child enjoys. Here we’re using Little Bricks and a small bird stuffed animal. Set up the building toy in an easily accessible container and place the figurine nearby. You can prompt play by inviting your child to build a home for the toy. Say “Do you think you could build a home for the little bird?” “What kind of home would he like?” Language is important here - try to avoid naming a specific type of structure (castle, house, stable) and instead use the word “home” which is specific enough for the child to know what you’re talking about but vague enough for them to interpret on their own.
2. Meet a certain size challenge
For a super straight forward invitation to build, ask your child to create a structure that is of a certain height or length. Here I’ve invited my children to build a structure using Interlox squares that reaches across the whole table. Other ideas could be creating a structure that’s as tall as a certain stuffed animal or the child themselves. You might even invite the child to build a structure that’s big enough for a group of toys to fit inside or one that your child can stand in the center of without it breaking! This kind of challenge is extremely open ended and gives children a lot of control in how they choose to meet it.
3. Solve a “real life” problem
In this play invitation you’ll set up a “real” problem for the child to solve through play. Here I set up a situation where my children needed to use Table Top Notch Blocks to build a way across a body of water (here, a playsilk). Other “real life” problems could include building a way to get to a high place, building a place for figurines to eat their lunch, creating a structure to protect vehicles from a storm, or really anything that could be presented as a problem! Notice, in these prompts I’m not asking the child to build a bridge, staircase, ramp, or garage explicitly. Instead we are going to allow the child to come to a conclusion for solving the problem on their own. It might be totally different than what we had in mind when we set up the invitation and that’s part of the magic of open-ended play!
Happy building!
