Gift Day 2: CitiBlocs

For Budding Architects: CitiBlocs

As long as you’ve got small people mastering fine motor skills living under your roof, you’ve got to give them something to stack besides your breakable coasters, so I’ve run the gamut of blocks and building sets in my home. My kids have lost those connectors without which an entire project is rendered useless. I have had to add to a basic set when my daughter needed more Eiffel in her tower. And as a result of all the re-buying and rebuilding, my house is overrun with blocks and links and bridges and trappings that could, in their collected state, erect a small vacation home next door.

CitiBlocs rather elegantly solves these problems. Don’t be fooled by the name; yes, these striking, sweeping precision-cut blocks could make a fine city skyline, but they can do other things besides. And that’s because every block is cut to a 1:3:5:15 ratio (and every one is the same size), which is the basic formula for constructing any building no matter the scale. What does this mean for your kid? Because the CitiBlocs makers bothered to employ a little math in conceiving their block set, your child can now literally build pretty much anything from one basic set—no connectors or links or extra parts or embellished sets necessary. You can get them in a bright rainbow of colors or in an eco-friendly unpainted version in sets of 50 up to 300.

It’s genuinely like working with a blank slate—except this blank slate has a nice, gentle weight in the hand (the wood is top-notch Grade A Radiata Pine from renewable forests, of course) and just feels good to stack. Talk about open-ended play: since the structure of these blocks is so uniform, the game of it really is about what you can dream up and how you’re going to pull that off (so balance, perspective, concentration, planning….).  And because the design principle here is simple mathematical efficiency, your kid’s CitiBlocks are probably going to still be cool when he’s 14.

www.citiblocs.com for stores

Photo courtesy of CitiBlocs

Comments