There's more to stacking blocks than meets the eye

For your toddler, stacking blocks and sending them tumbling is all about the fun, as it should be! But the next time you see your young builder in action, take a moment to fully appreciate all the developmental areas of learning they're demonstrating when doing this...

• To pick up the block, your toddler must use their fine motor abilities, as well as their hand-eye coordination to stack it on top of another. They must have a steady hand to carefully lay the blocks on top of each other and to know when to release the block to save the tower from collapsing. 
• Your toddler thinks about how tall they want their tower to be when they are building – this shows their developing cognitive skills. 
• They're playing with science: cause and effect, balance, stability, force and gravity all come into play here.
• Consider how much mathematics is going on in your toddler's head as they connect shape and size, number and height! 
• They're even building their own sense of resilience – the tower will undoubtedly collapse before your toddler's added all the blocks they want, but they learn that it is ok to start again. 

As your toddler grows, so too will their imagination and structures. What begins with a small tower of blocks will eventually lead to the construction of, well, whatever their curious, engineering mind comes up with!