Going LIFESIZE: Where STEM and Gross Motor Meet!

Large materials in your block play area can get your students working their muscles while engaging STEM thinking, indoors.

Hollow Blocks and our new Wobble Boards deliver an opportunity for children to shape indoor landscapes for their construction play.  Ramps, boxes and planks inspire children to create an environment for building, to explore how different levels, planes and angles effects structure. 

Wobble Boards with flock side up makes a hill and Hollow Blocks add other planes and levels of play for Villagers Large Wooden Trucks.  

Kids love to balance, rock, slide, sit and jump on or off our new Wobble boards.  While their smooth or flocked surfaces (depending on which side you flip them) form indoor hills and valleys. 

Wobble boards create engaging surfaces for unit blocks.

With Rigamajig, children explore the mechanics of simple machines with planks, bolts, pulleys, wheels at a life-size scale.  There are downloadable plans to help build cranes, carts, or figures or they can just freestyle. (See the full size Rigamajig Basic Builder Kit here and the smaller scale Rigamajig Jr. here.

Rigamajig Basic Builder Kit

With Hollow Blocks, Rigamajig or Wobble Boards students grasp, lift, shift, attach and tighten -- engaging legs, hips, arms and their core.  That’s good, complex gross motor work. 

 Hollow Blocks bridge construction and dramatic play - kids build with their large muscles.

The Community Playthings’ large trucks, firetrucks and busses compliment this indoor large muscle play in a block area and bridge into dramatic play.  The chunky maple design is so inviting, smaller children will ride them.  And the construction is so sturdy you don’t have to worry about it:  axles won’t buckle, bits won’t break off. 

Villagers Large Wooden Trucks from Community Playthings

The ladders and other components, make it easy to reconfigure these chunky toys for different narratives.  And the included Villagers figurines are safe for use with children as young as infants.  Villagers figurines infant safe rating speaks to not only the careful selection of natural materials including their finishing, but the design too:  large enough not to be a choke hazard, and includes a hole through the centre for additional safety.

Villagers figurines are rated infant safe, wooden people:  sized right, with a hole through the centre made with natural finishes and quality maple hardwood.

Getting started with whole body block play doesn’t take a big investment. 

The Villagers Large Wooden Trucks from Community Playthings are available individually. 

Villagers Large Wooden Trucks from on Hollow Blocks by Community Playthings.

LKG stocks a value line along with our Community Playthings Hollow Blocks.  The Community Playthings line are available in mini sets and even a la carte – so you can build up your centre gradually.  

Community Playthings Hollow Blocks at the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic Child Care Centre, St. Gabriels.

After all, just a few Hollow Block ramps and rectangles with a Wobble Boards can reshape an environment in an almost infinite number of ways.  Delivering new landscapes to build structures with your blocks and environments to ride your Villager Trucks or build a Rigamajig machine.

Hollow Blocks and Villager Trucks in Ontario Child Care Centre

This is natural STEM discovery that engages all your muscles with your brain, even indoors.

Rigamajig Basic Builder Kit