A picture by the manufacturer, showing some of the countless possible crafts.
K’NEX Kid Zoomin’ Buddies Set – Assorted Creatures
Category: Plastic Building Kits
Plastic building kits are construction sets designed for children that primarily utilize plastic components. These kits consist of various interlocking pieces, connectors, panels, and accessories that allow children to build and create a wide range of structures, vehicles, and other imaginative designs.
Plastic building kits are known for their versatility, durability, and ease of use. The pieces are often designed to fit together securely, enabling children to construct stable and sturdy creations. These kits usually come with a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, allowing for endless possibilities and encouraging children to think creatively and problem-solve while constructing their designs.
Many plastic building kits also incorporate specialized parts such as wheels, hinges, and gears, adding an extra level of functionality and enabling children to create movable and interactive models. Some kits may even include motorized components that bring the creations to life with spinning gears or moving parts.
These kits are popular among children of various age groups and provide numerous educational benefits. They promote fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, and logical thinking. Additionally, plastic building kits foster creativity, imagination, and cognitive development as children design and build their own unique structures and scenarios.
Overall, plastic building kits offer a stimulating and engaging way for children to explore construction, design, and engineering concepts while having fun and unleashing their creativity.
K’Nex Weirdo 7
Another, different K’Nex creature. This one makes good use of these green feet pieces.
DIPLODOCUS 1
The set manual proposed this set, so we made it first.
Clics Dinos
This Clics set has pieces of unusual metalic color and decorative stickers to make a cute dinos of all kinds.
ClicsToys, a Belgian company established in 2001, operates its very own factory located in Kempen, where they craft the popular Clics building blocks. These building sets mostly have square pieces, all sharing identical form and shape. What sets Clics apart is their ability to connect smoothly at the edges, allowing flexible joint movements.
Using these plastic squares, the creative possibilities are endless, even though Clics sets usually offer relatively few extra pieces and accessories. Some sets may include wheels and decorative panels, but few extra items. The true strength of Clics lies in the generous number of pieces in their sets, allowing you to make even biggest creations with ease. The pieces of Clics are too big to swallow and easy to hold, so they are safe, but some connections can be too tricky to younger kids. So the most sets are recommended for children who are 3 years old or older. However, these sets will be interesting even for the 10-years-olds.
The fundamental building blocks in Clics are square, which naturally leads to the cubic or brick-like structures. However, the great advantage of these blocks is the ability to connect them at various angles, making diverse shapes. Careful assembly can even give you triangular or sloping figures. Nevertheless, the most robust and tough structures in Clics are cube-shaped. Additionally, you can create flat mosaics by combining pieces of different colors.
500 Piece Zoob
500 piece Zoob set is classic in all possible ways. It has those typical Zoob pieces with balls and sockets, but no extra pieces. This is a great set if you are interested in Zoob building. It’s more than enough for big and complex crafts. The photo shows all the pieces of this set and the baseplates (round red pieces).
Back in 1997, inventor Michael Grey introduced Zoob, a toy inspired by the science of motion and organism development. Zoob represents an acronym for Zoology, Ontology, Ontogeny, and Botany. Each set has rod-like pieces with joint balls and sockets on their ends. Each of these balls has small bumps on its surface, so the joints can both move and stay in a certain position if you need them to.
This innovative toy features a ball and socket connection system, mimicking the natural movement and design found in people, animals, and machines. With just five basic shapes, Zoob offers 20 different ways to connect them together.
Zoob building sets have won awards because they’re different from regular building blocks. They use plastic pieces that snap together, like gears and joints, to build all kinds of objects, limited only by your imagination. After you build something with Zoob, you can actually play with it – the pieces were designed to move after being assembled, so you can have fun with the toys you create.
Zoobs are great for helping children improve their fine motor skills. The pieces are small enough to easily manipulate and put them together. But they’re not too tiny like some other toys, so it’s easier for kids who find small objects tricky.
Tiko Power Station
A huge Tiko power station. The buildings and the fence are from Tiko, the power lines a from K’Nex.
Tiko is a vintage building set, just like Tako. But, unlike Tako, Tiko pieces are solid panels of different shapes. They also connect by the edges – each edge has some sockets and some balls at regular intervals. Together, the balls and sockets form joints, so you can connect the pieces at different angles. The pieces themselves have different sizes – some are palm-sized, and others are smaller. But it’s possible to connect the pieces of different sizes, as long as the sockets match. Some big pieces have open centers – and these openings also have sockets, so you can add something there.
Since some Tiko pieces are so big, you can easily make crafts that are as tall as a 10-year-old child, and parts will actually hold together. Or you can make flat mosaics if you want to, and then roll them to make a 3D figure. There are no people figurines or decorations, but the building possibilities are endless. With Tiko, can create abstract shapes, buildings, toy furniture, and even something they can wear themselves. It’s a pity this set isn’t available to buy anymore, but there are some similar toys with the same basic concepts.
K’NEX Kid Zoomin’ Buddies Set – Wheels
Another bunch of assorted Kid K’Nex creatures made from the same set.
Peek-A-Blocks – Cubes With A Secret
Peek-A-Blocks are cubes for kids by Fisher Price brand. A side of the cube is 2 inches. Our middle daughter got these cubes first at a respectable age of 2 years old. We bought her cubes with different sounds – rattles, bells and other noisemakers. And then we got other options. There are cubes of different themes – animals, vehicles, the alphabet. Cubes are usually transparent, for example, you can see insides of cube with an animal from 5 sides.
There are also little attractions – a dog wags its tail when you shake a cube, beads jump around a pig, ducklings spin around with their mother. In general, for kids this is not only the very first building material, but also an entertaining toy.
Usually there are 6 cubes in a set. To further fascinate your child with these set, there are also various tables, sorters and other devices for playing with cubes. For this purpose, we have a musical giraffe. But kids no longer put the cubes in it, they use small cars.
The photo shows our very favorite cubes. For example, a chicken squeaks when you press a button on top and at the same time hides behind a descending shell. The kids really like touching the strings and ribbons on the cubes. Our absolute favourite cubes are those with a bell and a metal ball. And the youngest loves a cube with 3 carrots spinning in it.
Then manufacturers made the cubes with an additional “brush” on 2 sides of the part; now you can connect them to each other and attached to the same bristly surface. I really liked the idea of looking at an object through a transparent wall, and for my growing younger daughters I made noisy jars that they can use to make noise. You can use the cubes to build simple towers and marvel at the contents.
K’Nex Weirdo 6
Yet another K’Nex creature with earss, tail and fins.
K’NEX 35 Model Building Set – Skier
Just as any K’Nex set, this set has flake-like pieces of different shapes which can connect to the rods and other flakes. This K’Nex 35 models kit contains 480 pieces, including both large and small flake-like parts. It also comes with thick and thin rods that match these pieces, along with some rods meant to connect the larger and smaller flakes. These special pieces aren’t found in all K’Nex sets.
One great feature of this kit is that it includes a spacious storage box. You can use this box to store partially built toys and continue working on them later.
Just like with other K’Nex sets, the pieces in this one fit together securely. You can easily take apart your creations and use the pieces to build something new. The regular K’Nex pieces are sturdy and can withstand active play, while the mini K’Nex pieces are a bit more delicate. This K’Nex 35 models kit includes pieces of both sizes.
It’s important to note that although the crafts you can make with K’Nex can be quite large, some of the pieces, especially the mini ones, are very small. This can be risky for very young children who might accidentally swallow them. Also, these pieces may be a bit tricky for smaller kids to assemble correctly. That’s why K’Nex sets are recommended for kids aged 7 and older.
