There are many responsibilities for a parent. Bottoms to be wiped, food to be fed, games to be played.

I'm fairly sure that of the three, the latter is the most important. A clean bottom will soon be soiled and a fully tummy will soon be rumbling, but the lessons learned on the living room floor will stay with Leona for a lifetime. I think it's a great shame that playing is viewed by so many as simply something to entertain children until they are old enough to work. There are "learning toys" like shape sorters and the like, but on the whole I think learning toys are a bit like free range eggs. Everybody agrees kids should have educational toys but it's not that important to most people. People go out to buy a toy and then when they find one they like they exclaim and it's educational!

I've been making an effort to play with Leona and in the early days it was difficult. She would lay there and giggle if you were funny (peekaboo generally did the trick). As Leona developed the games needed to be more complicated to keep her entertained, my favourite is when you hide and jump out on the left then hide and jump out on the right. Then left, then right and so on. Leona soon gets the rhythm and soon she's looking at the place where you are going to jump out before you get there. Then you don't. You jump out on the left a second time in a row. Hilarious. She loves it because unlike simply jumping out (which is predictable) it's a great surprise.

Anyway, Leona is at an age she learns by copying. She has a little musical box thing that makes noises when you push a button. At first we had to push the button for her but pretty soon she copied and figured out how to push buttons. It wasn't long until she figured out that different buttons do different things and very soon she had a favourite button (the one that plays music). She now pushes buttons on everything so when she found the TV remote she pushed the buttons. One of the buttons turns the TV on and off... that's her favourite one. It's pretty annoying when she locates the remote in the middle of Dr Who.

The learning by copying thing makes playing great fun, because you can do a simple task (like throwing a plastic shape in the toy box) and Leona will copy (if she feels like it). It's really exciting finding out what she can do and what she can't - for instance, she just can't sort the shapes yet. If you pick up a cube and put it in the square hole, she picks up the cube and just rams it in any old hole (which doesn't work, though occasionally she gets lucky).

The really special moments are when Leona tries to copy and nearly get it and then tries again and finally succeeds.. often with a clap and a giggle. Leona has a little set of wooden ring things that form a caterpillar and if you stack the ring things in a small tower she copies and stacks her own tower. It's been really exciting because at first she could only stack one or two rings before the tower fell down but now she can take it all the way.

Leona can now stack all eight rings and then knock them over, then stack them, then knock them over. Good fun. But it's lead to a problem. In all the toys Leona has (and she has loads) she has very little that can be stacked. She has a huge tub of Duplo, but she's nowhere near understanding how to click the bricks together (though she loves to pull them apart) and even I struggle to stack Duplo bricks without clicking them together. No... What this girl needs is a proper set of wooden building blocks. Blocks she can bash together and put on top of each other without little bumps on them getting in the way.

So what does a 21st century dad do? I go on the web and type "Wooden Building Blocks" of course (we don't want none of that plastic rubbish) and up come a load of building blocks and I buy some. Simply right?

Wrong.

You have no idea how complicated building blocks can be.

Cheap Modern Blocks

My first instinct was to get as many blocks as I could for as cheap as possible (makes a lot of sense right?) so I found this lovely set of 50 building blocks from Brio. Brio are more famous for those exciting (expensive) wooden train sets so I thought 50 blocks for only £12.99 - bargain. Only 25p a block.

Only, I originally found them on Amazon.com where they had less than favourable reviews...

These look like the standard wooden blocks we all grew up with in the online picture, but they are not. These are in fact a miniature version of our old standard blocks - maybe a quarter of the size. Perfect for losing all over the house, and not at all what I had in mind for my little boy.

Standard Unit Blocks

Now there's no way we want tiny blocks for Leona. She needs proper building blocks like real children had in the olden days. None of this miniscule modern tripe. Which got me wondering: How big should a building block be? I tried to holding my hand as if I had an invisible block in it and guestimated about two inches. Is that right? I decided to see if Wikipedia had an entry on children's building blocks.. it doesn't. At least, that's how it seemed, until I stumbled on an entry for something called a Unit Block.

A unit block is a type of standardized wooden toy block for children. Known also as standard unit blocks or Kindergarten blocks, these building blocks are common in preschools and some Kindergarten classrooms in the United States.

Jackpot! I thought... standardized wooden toy block. I mean, I don't really mind if Leona has the exact size, but at least this will give me an idea of how big building blocks are...

A unit block is 5.5 inches long, 2.75 inches wide, and 1.375 inches thick[1]. Larger pieces include the double (11 inches long) and quadruple (22 inches long) sizes. Smaller sizes are made in various fractions of the standard unit.

Hold on a moment... this isn't right. Different lengths, widths and heights. This isn't what I expected. I thought a standard building block would be a cube surely. Like you see in clipart of childrens toys. Little cubes with letters on. No? It would seem not. If you are so foolhardy as to type the words "standard unit blocks" in to everybody's favourite search engine you find hundreds of pages extolling the virtues of these oversized none-cube blocks.

(photo taken from www.oldfashionedblocks.com)

The unit block is enormous. 5.5 inches long. That's almost exactly 140mm (14cm for idiots). It's almost the distance from your wrist to your middle finger, a Standard Unit Block would fill my adult hand. Surely too big for babies? Having said that, it's easier to balance a big block on a big block and when she's older the "let's build a tower as high as we can" games will be more exciting.

Too big or not, the important part is the proportions. The width is half the length, the thickness is half the width. 1 x 2 x 4. What that means, is that that whether Leona knows it or not, her blocks would have mathematical properties. It means that if you stack four blocks like sheets of paper, they have the height of one block on it's end. Sounds like an obvious feature for oblong building blocks but it's a feature many of the non-standard cheaper sets are sorely lacking.

Which got me thinking. If Leona is going to be playing with blocks, are there any other properties the blocks should exhibit. If my bog standard cube was so sorely lacking, what else might I be missing.

Back at the Unit Block wikipedia page I couldn't help but notice a reference to something called a Froebel gift...

Froebel Gifts

Never heard of Froebel Gifts? No? Neither had I. Turns out Froebel practically single handedly invented the concept of nursery schools for kids (kindergarten) and as part of all that he invented a series of 'gifts' to be given to children as they grow up. The first gift is a soft ball on a piece of yarn and the latter gifts get a bit overtly educational (coloured beads on a grid) but gifts 3, 4, 5 and 6 present some pretty neat little sets of building blocks.

(photo taken from ozpod.com)

91 beechwood building blocks in four wooden boxes with sliding lids.

8 one inch cubes, 8 blocks 2 x 1 x .5 inches
21 one inch cubes,6 half blocks, 12 quarter blocks.
18 blocks 2 x 1 x .5 inches, 12 blocks 1 x 1 x .5 inches, 6 blocks 2 x .5 x 5 inches

These Froebel gifts are each presented to the child as a cube. The first (3rd) is a cube made up of eight cubes. It can be split in half along the vertical (in two directions) or the horizontal. The cubes can be placed alongside each other in a row or stacked in a tower. The cubes can show fractions (eight cubes can be halved and halved again).

Maybe I'm getting carried away, maybe Leona just wants some wooden things to bang together. But it seems to be the blocks we should buy should have the potential to be used in these interesting ways. Clearly not now, when she is not even 1 and a half (she won't get it), but later when she is four or five she can gain an appreciation for symmetry.

The problem with Froebel's gifts is that they are wholly incompatible with Unit Blocks. The Froebel gifts are cube based and while one of them is made up of 1 x 2 x 4 oblong blocks these blocks are not Unit Block sized. Unit blocks are 5+1/2 x 2+3/4 x 1+3/8 inches. To be compatible, Froebel's cubes would need to be 2+3/4 inches. They are 1 inch. Bummer.

The ideal solution for me would be to find a set of Froebel gifts made from a basis of 2+3/4 cubes. That way, the oblong blocks in the Froebel gifts would match the Standard Unit Block size. If anybody can find some online that I can afford to have shipped to England that would be great. I might have to try making my own, though I expect making building blocks that stack well is not as easy as it seems. Maybe it's misguided anyway, 2 and 3/4 inch cubes would be huge!

Castle Blocks

With all this talk of mathematical blocks, I've totally neglected the most amazing blocks of all...

These Castle Building Blocks (and only these ones hand made by this one guy) are awesome. The other Castle Building Blocks I have seen to not compare.

Conclusion

Oh my goodness. I've just lost most of an evening to writing about small pieces of wood. I need help. I've found an excellent blog about building blocks but am no closer to buying any.

So far.. I'm leaning in this direction, though I may give up and get these.

Ultimately. I think I need to get out more...