It is always good to have a bunch of (short) building projects to suggest to our toddlers. Here I would like to collect some easy ones for DUPLO.
I'm not particularly interesting in creating duplicates of real world objects, like building animals, houses, etc. The projects can be abstract, focus on something unexpected, or whatever.
Please share your experiences.
And here is my first project: Color towers:
Building towers is probably the first directed building effort that toddlers undertake. In this project I gave our son (20m) many bricks and built 4x4 monochromatic socles for towers. I told him that we are building a 'green', 'red', and so on tower. At first he only got that we are building towers, but I directed him toward using only the color that is already in the socle and after two or three wrongly placed colors he got it. After a few layers he even asked for specific colors to continue a specific tower. After the towers were high enough, together we inserted some nooks for figures to stand in. He did most of the building, and I only occasionally changed the orientation of some 2x4 bricks to make the towers more stable by interlocking. The visual impression of the result surprised me:
Here's a site with some excelent examples of simple Duplo builds, oriented towards 2-4 year olds: http://legoideas.si/
Hopefully you'll like idea or two!
When my kids played with Duplo, they always liked building things as tall as possible, or making patterns of colours (e.g. alternating red/blue bricks in a line), or lots of repeated structures (e.g. putting 4 2x2 squares on top of one 2x2 square to make a mushroom shape).
I would usually try to suggest ways to make things stronger, then let them run with it. So a huge tower might start with me making a wide, flat base to give stability, then letting them organize the rest of it.
Depending on your child's propensity for putting things into their mouths, Lego 2x4 bricks fit well with duplo and can be used to fill in gaps or provide better binding in some cases.
I make a selection of 2x4 duplo bricks and the window bricks, together with a base plate. Soon a couple of buildings will emerge, giving your kid a great feeling by "doing great stuff by its own!".
Happy building!
A tower is one of the most common things young children often build. Even at a very young age, many people are fascinated by tall structures, which may partially explain humanity's urge to build up to the clouds (seriously, every major civilization from ancient Egypt onward has had an itching desire to build as tall as they can). Another common thing built with toy blocks is houses, with the standard design being something square with a door, and window and topped with a triangle, usually with a rectangle to represent a chimney, regardless of what real-life houses look like in the area where the child resides. Castles are yet another structure that's often built with blocks, and they usually consist of basic walls with square towers and an arched opening. Humans, extraterrestrials and animals are still another suggestion.
