Popular Building Toys for Kids

Vintage building toys and vintage toys made new again

Childhood just isn't the same as it used to be. If you read a story in the news these days about a childrens building project, it will probably be about websites or alternative-fuel cars rather than Lincoln Logs. But your budding engineer has to begin somewhere, and building toys for kids can be so much fun that your child won't even realize they're learning. We've assembled a list of some of the most popular building toys for kids today.

LEGO

LEGO products are even more popular today than when they became a leading American toy craze of the 1960s. The uses for LEGO bricks have changed a little since then. You're just as likely to see commercials or music videos made using LEGO bricks and stop-motion animation as you are a child playing with a LEGO set. LEGO even caters to this trend with its LEGO Studios sets, which feature a web cam, computer video recording software, and LEGO figures.

You could probably say then that LEGO play sets are popular building toys for kids and adults. The LEGO company has maintained a strong cultural presence by acquiring toy rights for such pop culture icons as Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Vintage toy building sets

Parents may be nostalgic for the toy building sets of their childhood, but so are grandparents. Some of the popular building toys for kids of past decades have resurfaced as collector's items thanks to the Internet and sites like eBay.

Not all of these vintage toy building sets were wooden. Plastic, rubber, and vinyl toy building sets can be found that were manufactured in American and Europe, from 1970s toy building sets all the way back to pre-World War Two vintage toy building sets with names like Bild-o-Brock and Minibrix.

K'Nex

K'Nex is one of the newer popular building toys for kids on the market. The K'Nex toy construction system is similar to older building toys such as LEGO and Tinkertoys, but K'Nex uses color coded interconnecting plastic rods and connecting pieces. K'Nex building toys also use wheels and chain links, and can employ battery and solar-powered motors.

K'Nex building toys are broken down into several different product lines, including:

Big Builds (amusement park rides and tall towers)

Tubs 'N Cases (multi-part sets)

Flex K'Nex (toy building sets with flexible parts)

O.C.C. (Orange County Choppers)

Kid K'Nex (education building toys for children)

Hexabits

Hexabits have also become popular building toys for kids. Hexabits are flexible, interlocking hexagonal puzzle pieces manufactured from recycled plastic. Hexabits can be especially fun building toys because they come in eighteen different colors and are shaped in a way that permits construction of 3-dimensional objects.

Hexabits can be used to make practical items such as doormats, or one of the creatures from the Hexabit Critterz line, such as a lady bug, scorpion, box turtle, or butterfly.

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