Hi friends! Today’s activity only took me a few minutes to set up and engaged my three year old twins for quite awhile- a giant block puzzle!
DIY Giant Block Puzzle
What you need:
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- Large sheets of paper (we used drawing paper from a roll like THIS
- you could use anything you have on hand, even newspaper!) - Tape (we like to use painter’s tape
so it easily comes up from the floor) - Building blocks of various shapes (the set pictured is THIS
one from Haba- best blocks hands-down) - A writing utensil to trace your shapes.
Set Up:
Tape large sheets of paper to the floor to make a giant canvas. Scatter your blocks across the paper.
Now, trace around your blocks using whatever you have on hand. I started with a Sharpie but didn’t want to get too many marks on our blocks, so I switched to crayon and then went back and traced over it with the marker. Even with this extra step, it only took me a few minutes to do. The outlines don’t have to be perfect.
Now, scatter your blocks around the outside of the paper or put them in a basket and then add your children.
Mine got right to work finding the right spots for all of the blocks.
It’s Smart!
This activity was fun, simple, and stimulates so many areas of development.
Language- shape vocabulary, descriptive/comparative vocabulary (short/long, etc.)
Social skills- The twins worked together to find the right blocks for the different outlines, helping each other see the more subtle differences in shape and size. It was really interesting to watch!
Collaborating to find the correct outline for the block- they were discussing long vs. short!
Motor- both fine and gross motor skills were called upon to complete the giant puzzle
Visual-spatial skills
Problem-solving and reasoning
Plus, when you’re done, you have a giant canvas to color to your heart’s content!
I hope you enjoyed our quick and easy block puzzle activity. Let me know in the comments if you try it out yourself- I’d love to hear how it went!
You might also enjoy our Language Basics posts where we talk all about language and how to stimulate it in your own home. Thanks for reading!
another easy excellent activity plus an detailed how-to! Thanks!
Oh, how clever are you?!!! This is awesome!
Brilliant! I love when I see a kid activity that I want to do, too.
So clever! And simple! So doing this!
What a brilliant idea, Stephanie. This would be a cool modern art project for older kids. They could trace the block pieces and then fill in with paints or markers and then paint a nice background.
This is a wonderful activity, Stephanie. I am going to do this during our small groups with our 3 year old class. Thank you so much for sharing on my Facebook page!
What a creative and simple activity ! I am pinning this for when my son is a little older
I love finding new ways to play with blocks- this one is fantastic
I will pin for future use with my munchkin 
We tried it! Fun, although it ended up being more of a springboard to block play for us.
How it worked for us
Did it! Put a pic up on my blog of this activity this week!