Building Block Toys

Building block toys and other popular wooden building toys for kids

Building block toys have been used for over 200 years to teach and entertain children. Wooden alphabet blocks are often the first real exposure many children have to letters, and numerous future architects and engineers first learned about physics and gravity through building block toys. Building block toys can take different forms, but their traditional material is wood. These are some of our favorites.

Alphabet blocks

Wooden alphabet blocks are among the most iconic symbols of childhood. Their look is simple and memorable: one inch squares of light wood, with colorful borders on either side and large, bold letters rising out from a white center. Wooden alphabet blocks have remained popular childrens building block toys for centuries because they pack so much usefulness into such small squares.

Alphabet blocks can provide your childs first lesson in so many different subjects: language, geometry, arithmetic.  And even when they're not providing a lesson, alphabet blocks can provide hours of fun as children use them to give shape to the structures in their imagination.

Tinkertoys

Tinkertoy was one of the first popular wooden toy construction sets of the 20th century. The Tinkertoy construction set was created in 1914 by Charles H. Pajeau and Robert Pettit. Their goal was to create a wooden toy building set that would permit children to give shape to their ideas and develop their natural curiosity about the world around them.

Tinkertoy building sets consist of many wooden and also plastic pieces, including pulleys, end caps, connectors, and multi-colored sticks. The primary pieces though are wooden spools that have small holes drilled into them all around their perimeters plus one hole drilled through the center. The colored sticks are inserted into these holes and in this way the spools and sticks are joined together to create practical or imaginative objects.

Tinkertoy wooden toy building sets are great educational tools that will inspire and entertain your children. For an extra fun challenge, you could show your children images of some of the fascinating devices these building block toys have been used to create, such as Ferris Wheels, airplanes, and robots.

Lincoln Logs

Lincoln Logs may seem like the original wooden building block toys, but they were actually invented a couple of years after Tinkertoys. Lincoln Logs have a great pedigree though: they were invented by John Lloyd Wright, son of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Lincoln Logs are wooden building toys shaped like notched miniature logs. They're most often used to create replicas of log cabins of the kind in which American President Abraham Lincoln grew up. For that reason, Lincoln Logs are useful educational toys and can be a helpful visual complement to a childs history studies. Oversize Lincoln Logs are also available for smaller children in My First Lincoln Logs building block toy sets.

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