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.

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K’NEX Education – STEM Explorations: Swing Ride

This motorised K’NEX Swing Ride set proposes few moving models to build. It looks like K’Nex really likes carnival rides. This is one of the models from the set’s manual.

Many K’Nex Education sets offer moving models, and can have gears and motors. This one also have one motor to power the movement of your crafts.

This set has relatively small pieces and an electric motor, so it will not be a good choice for the small children. Sometimes connecting pieces may also be though, so the best age for this K’NEX Swing Ride set is 8-10 years old. Even if this set has no mini K’Nex pieces, you should be very careful about giving it to any child under the age of 7. You should also be careful around the moving gears – they are not metal, but having hair stuck in it is still very unpleasant.

Moving crafts can be a great add-on to any K’Nex collection. However, this set has a relatively small number of gears for so many regular pieces, so you have to be precise while using them. The set also offers a very limited number of the possible models. This, however, is not a big problem, since K’Nex crafts are easy to invent, and this set is more than enough to create many different things.

K'NEX Education - STEM Explorations: Swing Ride
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K’Nex Buggy

As I expected, this type of building set interested my eldest son… I handed him the 100 Crafts K’Nex set, saying what this is a gift for a sucessful end of the school year. There was still a whole school week ahead, but on the same day he already relaxed and tried to slack off his homework, occupied in assembling models.

K’Nex comes in two sizes: regular and mini K’Nex. It also includes both thick and thin rods, and some rods can connect the larger and smaller pieces together. Not all sets include mini parts. 100 crafts K’Nex set, for example, has only regular ones.

Like other K’Nex sets, this one features pieces that securely lock together. You can easily take apart your creations and use the pieces to build something new. Regular K’Nex pieces have stronger connections, making crafts sturdy even during active play. Mini K’Nex creations are a bit more delicate.

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 make K’Nex sets risky for small babies who might accidentally swallow the pieces. These small parts can also be a bit challenging for younger kids to assemble correctly. That’s why it’s recommended for children aged 7 and older to use K’Nex sets.

It’s also worth noting that most K’Nex sets don’t provide detailed crafting instructions. Some packages may only show completed toys as examples. However, thanks to the versatility and creative possibilities K’Nex offers, this usually isn’t a significant issue.

K'Nex Buggy
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Taikon Basket

A small basket with a lid made from our favourite Taikon set. All our family built it together. It was very fun and calming.

Building straws are a popular and unusual type of building set. These sets include long, hollow flexible tubes that connect to each other at their ends. Since the tubes themselves have no special connecting devices, the set also includes special connecting parts. These parts are very small hard and rigid, and they have long pins that you can insert into the straws. The number and the positions of these pins can vary, so different connectors hold the straws’ ends at different angles. Because the tubes are flexible, this simple principle allows you to assemble countless shapes and crafts.

These sets are very unusual because they allow you to create any geometrical form you want and use the bent lines. The final craft will always be hollow, lightweight, and almost symbolic. However, you will still recognize these shapes, and they look more detailed and solid if they have more straws. Also, the straws are soft, so you can shorten them with a pair of common scissors if you need to. Sadly, there is no way to fix the straw after it was cut. Since the long straws bend more smoothly than the short straws connected in a row, the long ones are very valuable in these sets. So you have to be careful if you want to cut something.

Taikon Basket
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IYuePeng Building Blocks

IYuePeng building blocks set are very similar to Gakken blocks. This set has pices of different and unusual shapes and proportions.

The pieces of this set have unusual proportions compared to the different “waffle” blocks. They have slim, long pegs and big openings, and you can fit two pegs in one opening if you need to. There are also rod-like pieces most waffle block don’t have. These long and slim details can be very handy if you want to stack pieces instead of connecting them the usual way.

The set also includes wheels and specias axis details. So you can connect the wheels seamlessly to the rest of your craft. This is a major improvement compared to the older “waffle” sets where the wheels couldn’t actually rotate. Most “waffle” building sets also have sharp shapes with many corners, with Gakken being one of the exceptions. IYuePeng building blocks set has pieces with round ends, so the crafts look more smooth.

The size of the pieces is smaller that in the most “waffle” building blocks. All the pieces in this set are abot 1.5 inch long and less than an inch thick. They are safe for the older kids to use, but they still may be too tricky for children who are younger than 3 years old.

IYuePeng Building Blocks
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Clics Mosaic Rooster

A Clics mosaic picture. It’s actually very sturdy and all pieces hold together well.

ClicsToys is a Belgian company that was founded in 2001. They operate their own factory located in Kempen, where they manufacture the well-known Clics building blocks. These building sets consist of square pieces, all of which share the same form and shape. They easily connect at their edges, forming joints that can be moved.

Since the fundamental components of Clics are square, the basic forms you can build are typically cubic or brick-like. Nevertheless, thanks to the movable joints, you can connect them at various angles, resulting in diverse shapes. With careful assembly, it’s even possible to create triangular or sloping figures. However, the cubes remain the most robust and dependable structures this set can offer. Additionally, you can explore the option of crafting flat mosaics by combining pieces of different colors.

Using these plastic squares, you can construct flat surfaces and transform them into 3D shapes. Despite having relatively few extra pieces and accessories, Clics offer limitless creative possibilities. Some sets may include wheels and decorative panels, but these are the primary add-ons. On the plus side, Clics sets generally contain numerous pieces, enabling you to create complex structures with a single set.

Clics Mosaic Rooster
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Geometric Fantasy

10-year-old Nate made her first contribution to the collection of crafts made from this Knex regular sized kit. Don’t you want to build Soma cubes from the K’Nex construction set?

The K’Nex construction set was invented by Joel Glickman, who, while bored at a party, twirled cocktail straws in his hands and tried to connect them in different ways. This is how he got the idea of the set – flexible sticks and their possible rigid connections. The set first appeared in 1993 in the USA. You can read about the features of the parts on Wikipedia. Since 2001, the manufacturer added the Lego-type parts in the construction set for greater variability in models, especially to the models with space themes. Probably it had some connection to the release by Lego of the Star Wars series. You can check the entire variety of K’Nex for children aged 2 years and older on the K’Nex website.

We made this ornament from K’Nex pieces of regular size. This type of K’Nex is not very popular in our family. This is probably because started to introduce the older kids to K’Nex with Knex regular sized kit and they were not very interested. The mini K’Nex and kid K’Nex had much more success.

Geometric Fantasy
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4M Straw Building Set

The Chinese also have their own straw building set (4M manufacturer). Of course, there are many version of these sets by many brands from China, but this is the one we had a personal expirience with.

Building straws are a popular and unusual type of building set. These sets include long, hollow flexible tubes that connect to each other at their ends. Since the tubes themselves have no special connecting devices, the set also includes special connecting parts. These parts are very small hard and rigid, and they have long pins that you can insert into the straws. The number and the positions of these pins can vary, so different connectors hold the straws’ ends at different angles. Because the tubes are flexible, this simple principle allows you to assemble countless shapes and crafts.

These sets are very unusual because they allow you to create any geometrical form you want and use the bent lines. The final craft will always be hollow, lightweight, and almost symbolic. However, you will still recognize these shapes, and they look more detailed and solid if they have more straws. Also, the straws are soft, so you can shorten them with a pair of common scissors if you need to. Sadly, there is no way to fix the straw after it was cut. Since the long straws bend more smoothly than the short straws connected in a row, the long ones are very valuable in these sets. So you have to be careful if you want to cut something.

4M Straw Building Set
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