Brain Blox Wooden Building Planks – Review

My kids love building things – I mean, it’s one of their very favorite things. Always has been. Even when they were tiny, they would take apart board games and play sets and just build things with all of the pieces.

They can’t be the only kids out there who love old-fashioned building, but blocks aren’t easy to find these days. That’s why I was super excited for the opportunity to review Brain Blox Wooden Building Planks from Brain Blox.

These blocks were exciting from the moment they arrived. They were shipped in a compact box with this great quote from Dr. Seuss on the inside flap:

I love that quote – and also the encouragement for kids to use their gifts and talents as best they can. They don’t need to become cookie cutters of someone else’s ideal kid – they were designed to be their own unique, creative selves, and these blocks are a perfect way to encourage that from the very beginning!

This definitely manifested itself in the way that my kids each chose to use the blocks during their free build times – but more about that later.

As for the shipping? The box wasn’t the only great thing about it – there’s a bag, too! There really is! We received a set of 200 planks, and the set comes with a sturdy, red drawstring bag for storing the blocks later. (I’m glad, because even though my kids are big now, they’d never want to stack them in the original box each time they use them). The bag makes the planks easy to clean up and easy to store, too, which means that we’ll use them more often.

Brain Blox comes with a pamphlet full of ideas for builds that you can do. These are more complicated designs, and they look really cool when they’re finished. You can see it in the background of this picture.

My Big Helper loved trying out all of the official Brain Blox designs. She was determined to set up the blocks to be level and even and to make the most complicated designs possible. She loved playing with them and eventually looked at the patterns within their designs and started making her own that rivaled theirs in difficulty.

On the other hand, while My Little Man was capable of following those directions, he preferred not to. He had his own ideas in mind, and he set goals and challenges for himself. He liked to see how high he could stack the blogs, how top heavy he could make his design, or how non-linear he could make something be and still use all of the planks. He imagined many of these designs to be big, complicated buildings, and he would tell stories of which space was which room and who might live there. It was fun to see him be so excited!

No matter how you’d like to use the planks, however, Brain Blox has some great ideas. They have lots of freebies on their website with ideas, challenges, and puzzles for ways to extend the play. There’s even a YouTube channel where you can go to learn more techniques. My kids love being able to take charge of their own learning, and I love that there are so many things that can be done with these. I hate to call these toys, because they’re really more than a single thing; instead, they have multiple uses, which is limited only by your imagination.

We have big plans for our Brain Blox, too. They have so many possibilities! We’re reading and studying The Hobbit right now, so the kids are each using the planks to design their own Hobbit hole. We’re studying civics this year, and we’re going to build the major US monuments and buildings that housed the origins of our country. Breaking out the Brain Blox is a great activity for our read-aloud times, too, as the kids can keep their hands busy and design but still listen to our current story.

We all love our Brain Blox! They’re going to be loads of fun for a very long time. Don’t take our word for it, though – you can read lots of other reviews from Homeschool Review Crew bloggers by clicking on the graphic below.

Do you have Brain Blox? Share what you would do with them in the comments!