10 Amazing Ideas for Playing With Wooden Building Blocks

Author: Joe Kanooga

If you think wooden building blocks are just for little kids…think again! There are many fun and interesting things even middle school students can enjoy doing. Most of these will work best on a hard, smooth surface such as linoleum or hardwood, rather than rugs or carpet. For some of them, you can even work on a tabletop.

1. Build a tower as high and narrow as you can. Count the number of wooden blocks you used and take pictures. Look up the world record for a tower of wooden blocks. Measure yours. Did you come close?

2. Build a castle and decorate it with paper pennants glued to toothpicks. Make knights and ladies out of paper figures cut out from magazines. Add a picture of yourself and tape on a paper crown. Congratulations! You are now ruler of a miniature realm.

3. Create a maze for your pet hamster and time how long it takes him to get through. If he seems unmotivated, give him a little training. Start him off easy with a straight run with food at the end, so he gets the idea (it helps if he’s hungry). Next add a turn or two. Finally put him in a full-fledged maze with many turns and dead ends. Time him on successive runs. Does his speed improve?

4. If your wooden building blocks are of many different sizes and shapes, it can be as fun and challenging as any puzzle to try to stack them compactly together into the smallest possible space.

5. Outline miniature bowling lanes with wooden blocks and challenge your friends to a game. Use colorful cap erasers for bowling pins and marbles for bowling balls. Deduct points for hitting the block walls of the lane. Make the game more challenging by keeping the lanes fairly long, and the erasers just far enough apart that you have to hit them exactly right to get a strike. Make the game easier by shortening the lanes and positioning the erasers a little closer together.

6. Build a spiral staircase. This might require a lot of building blocks to achieve the full effect, but it will be a lot of fun.

7. Build an arch completely made of wooden blocks. For help, look up arches in your encyclopedia. If your wooden building blocks do not include a keystone shape, you might need to create one out of cardboard for the top.

8. Build a special “domino city” and carefully run a line of dominos in, out, around, up, down and over the building blocks. Set up a small bell at the end (one of those little Christmas jingle bells tied on a ribbon works well). Push the first domino down.

9. Surprise your mom by setting the table early for supper. Surprise her more by carefully balancing each water glass on a stack of wooden building blocks. Explain solemnly that you couldn’t find any stemware, so you improvised as best you could.

10. If you have a cat or dog that’s a good sleeper (or a big brother), carefully build a “house” right over top of them out of wooden blocks. Yes, include a roof (you can support it with strips of cardboard if your longest blocks aren’t quite long enough for the roof base). If it is a large dog, or your big brother, you may have only enough blocks for your house to cover his head. That’s okay. Be sure to be around when they wake up! Or perhaps, if it’s your big brother, you should be very far away.